U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Terrorism 2006 - Argentina

Argentina cooperated well with the United States at the operational level, and began to address legal and institutional weaknesses that have hindered its counterterrorism efforts. The Argentine government amended its money laundering legislation to strengthen and reorganize its Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), and created a new national Coordination Unit in the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights to oversee and manage the government's money laundering and terrorism finance efforts. The Attorney General's Office and the Central Bank both established special investigative units to handle money laundering and terrorism finance cases. In order to comply with a Financial Action Task Force (FATF) mandate, on December 20, President Kirchner approved a draft antiterrorism and counterterrorism finance law and sent it to Congress for review. If passed, the draft law would criminalize both terrorist acts and the financing of terrorism, and would provide the legal foundation for the FIU, Central Bank, and other law enforcement bodies to investigate and prosecute such crimes. The Argentine government and Central Bank have committed to freeze assets of terrorist groups identified by the United Nations if detected in Argentine financial institutions. Implementation will determine whether Argentine law enforcement institutions, including the Central Bank and FIU, aggressively apply the newly strengthened legal and administrative measures available to them.

Since President Bush's visit during the November 2005 Summit of the Americas, there were no reported incidents similar to the 20 small-scale bombings, attempted bombings, or acts of arson noted in Country Reports on Terrorism 2005. American businesses received e-mail threats and bomb threats, and were at times the focus of protests and demonstrations, but actual reporting and confirmation of these types of incidents declined.

Hizballah and Iran remained the chief suspects for the July 18,1994 terrorist bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) that killed 85 and injured over 200 people. On October 25, AMIA special prosecutors issued an 801-page indictment charging eight Iranian government officials and one member of Hizballah with the attack.¹ On November 9, Judge Canicoba-Corral ratified the indictments and maintained charges against former Iranian Ambassador Soleimanpour. The judge issued arrest warrants and on November 15, the Argentine government transmitted a request to INTERPOL for new Red Notices for the nine suspects. The year ended with action in INTERPOL pending.

1 The completion of the Special Prosecutors' investigation is the latest and, perhaps, the most important and promising development in the saga of a mismanaged and overly politicized 12-year investigation into the AMIA bombing. The attack destroyed the seven-story structure, killed 85 people and injured more than 300 Argentine citizens. In many ways, it was Argentina's September 11, and remains one of four major attacks by international terrorist groups in this hemisphere – the others being the Israeli Embassy bombing in Buenos Aires in 1992, the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and the 9/11 attacks.