HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------[Here's another instance of Argentina's arming of Tudjman's neofascist seccessionist rebellion in Croatia between 1991-1993. The link is more than incidental since the majority of WWII-era Nazi collaborators - a.k.a. the Ustasha - found refuge in Argentina after the war through the infamous Vatican sponsored "rat-lines". Note the tone of both the AP and Reuters dispatches in these stories, which display an incredible degree of sympathy for one of the most corrupt and reviled men in Argentina.]
Former Argentine Official Arrested
By BILL CORMIER
.c The Associated Press
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) - Former Argentine economy minister Domingo Cavallo was arrested on Wednesday after being questioned by a judge investigating illegal shipments of weapons to Croatia and Ecuador in the 1990s.
Cavallo, who at the time of the shipments was economy minister under former President Carlos Menem, was being held at a Buenos Aires military jail. He was questioned for more than an hour by Judge Julio Speroni, local media reported.
Investigators are trying to determine how some 6,500 tons of weapons officially listed as being bound for Panama and Venezuela from Argentina ended up in Croatia and Ecuador. Prosecutors say the shipments of cannons and gunpowder, valued at more than $100 million, entered those countries in violation of international arms embargoes.
Menem, accused of leading the smuggling ring, was placed under house arrest for six months last year by an investigating judge. Menem was Argentina's president from 1989 to 1999. Several former high-ranking officials of his administration have also been detained.
Cavallo served in Menem's administration from 1991 to 1996 and was widely credited for Argentina's subsequent economic turnaround. Free market policies reversed years of decline and transformed the country into a leading emerging market.
He was again named economy minister last year under former President Fernando de la Rua, but both resigned in December amid an economic crisis which triggered deadly riots and supermarket lootings, a default on the country's $141 billion public debt and a steep devaluation of the peso.
Cavallo was recently barred from leaving Argentina. He stands accused of advising banks to ignore court rulings overturning cash withdrawal restrictions on some savers. A freeze - which has since been partially lifted - was imposed on Argentines' savings in December in a bid to halt a massive run on the country's banks.
Cavallo's lawyer, Rafael O'Gorman, called Cavallo's arrest ``ridiculous.'' He refused further comment, saying he was going to meet with Cavallo. The former economy minister's supporters said it was politically motivated.
``I believe this falls more in the line of political persecution than that of a judicial decision,'' complained one supporter, Guillermo Cantini. He said the arrest was being used to distract attention from the country's deep economic crisis, now in its fourth year.
Congressional deputy Elisa Carrio, an independent anti-corruption campaigner, welcomed the ruling.
``Truth and justice will prevail,'' Carrio told the local news agency Diarios y Noticias.
AP-NY-04-03-02 1052EST
Argentine ex-economy minister arrested in arms case
By Lucila Sigal
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, April 3 (Reuters) - Former Argentine Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo, a titan of Latin American finance until he fell from power last year amid fiscal chaos and food riots, was arrested on Wednesday in an arms smuggling case.
A judge ordered the arrest after the 55-year-old Cavallo was questioned in court, a judicial official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. "They are taking him to a police headquarters," the official said.
Judge Julio Speroni has 10 days to decide whether to bring criminal charges against the former minister for alleged involvement in illegal shipments of cannons, rifles, ammunition and gun powder to Croatia and Ecuador from 1991-95.
His arrest added to a climate in which investors worry financiers and former officials are being made scapegoats for an economic and political crisis that has seen five presidents since December and courts besieged by angry Argentines protesting what they call judicial corruption.
"I think that there's a witch hunt (atmosphere) in the sense that everybody is trying to blame somebody else or trying to find who really is to blame for this crisis," said Geoffrey Dennis, a senior researcher at Salomon Smith Barney.
Cavallo, an economy minister under President Carlos Menem who made Argentina a showcase of market reform, was one of several ministers who signed decrees ordering arms sales to Panama and Venezuela that ended up illegally in Croatia and Ecuador.
But he has denied ordering any sales to Croatia in 1991 and 1993, when the warring Balkan state was under a U.N. arms embargo, and to Ecuador in 1995 during a border war with Peru in which Argentina was meant to be a peace mediator.
While Cavallo was an economy minister again in 2001 under President Fernando de la Rua, Menem was placed under house arrest for five months amid probes into the smuggling but was later released.
Political colleagues said Cavallo had been surprised by the judge's decision because he had already given evidence in the case last year and his lawyers made a legal appeal for his release. If he is charged and found guilty of arms smuggling, he could face up to 12 years in prison.
DECLINE AND FALL OF CAVALLO
Any charge would be a huge change in fate for a man who held markets on tenterhooks last year while at the helm of Latin America's troubled but third biggest economy.
Then seen as a savior for Argentina, Cavallo is now despised at home for freezing bank accounts last year to stop a run on banks and failing to prevent the economy from degenerating into chaos and civil unrest.
Long suffering Argentines had little faith in either the justice system or Cavallo.
"Nobody will ever know if Cavallo is guilty because of justice in this country. It doesn't exist," said Juan Carlos Rodriguez, standing in a bank line trying to withdraw savings originally frozen by Cavallo.
Cavallo left Menem's government in 1996 before joining De la Rua's administration. He was forced to quit in December along with De la Rua amid economic crisis, food looting and rioting that left 27 people dead.
Since De la Rua's resignation, courts have probed foreign bank executives for possible illegal capital transfers -- investigations that have worried some officials. One senior government official said fears of being arrested on a witch hunt after he left office kept him awake at night.
"It is a little bit like open season on vindictive actions to blame one part of society or another and this Cavallo allegation is just another part of that story," said Dennis.
Cavallo was once feted as the architect of Argentina's one-to-one peg to the U.S. dollar that heralded economic growth and made Argentina a darling of Wall Street investors in the 1990s.
But he was unable to end a grinding four-year recession. In January, the peg to the dollar was ditched and the peso was devalued.
(Additional reporting by Charlie Froggatt)
15:59 04-03-02
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