Weekly Report - 17 May 2007

The formal launch of the candidacy of the main challenger to an incumbent president would normally receive copious coverage in the press. Not so with Roberto Lavagna, the former economy minister of President Néstor Kirchner. Lavagna's inauguration of his Concertación para Una Nación Avanzada (UNA), a coalition comprised of Radicals, dissident Peronists and independents, was all but knocked off the front pages on 11 May by events in Santa Cruz on the same day: Kirchner's native province lost its third governor in the space of a year.