On Monday president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner fired back at critical media sources who she accused of defamation, misinforming the public and inventing news. The president was speaking in the Patagonia town of El Calafate, Santa Cruz province, at the inauguration of a major infrastructure project surrounding Glacier National Park. The president took the opportunity to respond to recent accusations of preferential treatment during the bidding process for the construction contract of a massive hydroelectric dam.
In the latest development in their ongoing feud with the administration, the Clarín media group had reported that the bidding for the lucrative contract had been limited to only a couple of firms, all with close ties to the Kirchners, who are from Santa Cruz province. The president denounced the charge, stating that “newspapers like Clarín and La Nación entered the second stage, which is to invent, invent news like this about companies that are friends of this government.” She went on to assure that there had been no preferential treatment in the bidding process.
The President further remarked that some media corporations have declared themselves as “enemies” of her administration, and added that “Journalists have all the right to disagree with the government’s politics, they can criticize us, but why do we have to go through a state of media paranoia and hysteria; why do they have to lie all the time, or treat me like I were a liar?” This last point of the president’s statement referenced a series of articles published by La Nación that called into question the president’s claim of being briefly detained in 1976 during the last military dictatorship. To this assertion the president retorted sharply that “they are the same newspapers that showed you a country that didn’t exist and a freedom that we didn’t have (during the last dictatorship).”