Letter from Buenos Aires

Dear Reader,


I received your message about delay in posting. I stand admonished! It is over eleven weeks since I posted my last episode of ‘Bond and Xiomara’ and you, my fourteen Substack readers, have been kept waiting too long for something more.

Rather than more, I thought you might prefer something fresh. By fresh, I mean a regular letter from Buenos Aires, not telling a story, but recounting my day-to-day movements here on behalf of Keir’s UK government. My boss, Richard (Moore) encourages greater openness from the service, and that permits me to write frankly about what is going on in the South Atlantic. There will, of course, be some detail I must keep from you, but I’ll give you clues as to when and what - if not why.

Xiomara and I have been kept busy recently. Let’s start with our last trip from Ezeiza (EZE) to New York (JFK) to safeguard our new Foreign Secretary, RH David Lammy. We were called on to oversee his meeting with Diana Mondino, Argentina’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, in which they discussed the Falkland Islands - or as Argentines prefer, Las Malvinas.

The aim of the meeting was ostensibly to sign a ‘South Atlantic Understanding’. It sounds posher than in reality, but now includes a monthly flight from Brasil’s Sao Paulo to the Islands, sorting out some over-fishing, and an initiative with the Red Cross relating to ‘the fallen’ - the remains of those who died in the 1982 conflict. The meeting was very much ‘beauty and the beast’. David (the beast) did well and behaved himself, avoiding calling anyone a ‘neo nazi’. It seems that Diana was too captured by the moment to notice David’s trainers. Xiomara sensed that the real reason of their meeting was less to do with the Falklands and more related to developing the UK/Argentine understanding sought by President Javier Milei. Given Xiomara’s connections, she should know.

Returning the following day to Buenos Aires, it quickly became apparent that the deal between Lammy and Mondino had tizzed Vice President Victoria Villarruel. It took her no time to Tweet her displeasure, unsurprising as her dad was a Malvinas colonel, albeit one who avoided allegations of human rights abuses.

Villarruel wrote, “Why? To be allowed to visit our Islands with a visa and passport? Do they think we are stupid? They obtain material advantages, concrete and immediate, while they offer us crumbs as an emotional consolation and weaken our possibility of negotiations.”

”It is unheard of that while the USA is offering us coastguard patrol vessels to protect our Argentine Sea from outer continental pillage, we are proposing to cooperate with the power that has usurped our territory and resources.”

“These are not words against our government, nevertheless it is inevitable that I should be outspoken about this agreement since it is an issue that reaches into each fibre of my identity and puts on line the standing interests of our Great Nation. But even as we are friends of everybody, first comes the Motherland.”

Milei was, as usual, incandescent with his VP, although he is yet to let on publicly or sack her. Xiomara suggested, as a precaution, we should monitor sales of chain saws!

In other news, probably on advice from Milei, on Thursday, BA Federal Judge Ariel Lijo ordered the Royal Spanish Academy Madrid to remove one of its definitions of the word “judío/a” (Jewish) “greedy or usurious.” Lijo, tipped as a future member of the Supreme Court of Argentina and liked by Milei, observed that it was “hate speech that incites discrimination on religious grounds.” Good decision, Lijo!
Also on Thursday, the National Institute of Statistics and Census released its report declaring that poverty in Argentina had risen to 52.9% of the Argentine population in the first half of 2024, up 11.2% from the second half of 2023. It went on to disclose that between December 2023 and June 2024, inflation reached 79.8%. Government observers here say that, whilst this sounds bad, it is better than the 90%, which would have happened but for Milei’s austerity policies. Whatever the case, reaching economic stability here in Argentina still seems an illusive goal.

Whilst Richard Moore has given UK agents a protocol for the use of artificial intelligence, it seems that Argentines lag well behind the western world with only 13% using AI regularly in their work. In the USA, Javier Milei met with both Zuckerberg and Musk to get some tips. Returning he observed that Argentina has cheap energy and a highly skilled workforce, putting it in an ideal position to lead in the field. He notes that Argentine data centres could be located in the south of the country for cooling. The hot news is our understand that he is working on deregulation to attract foreign investment, and here in the Capital Federal we can reveal a regional cybersurveillance initiative deploying algorithms on historic data to predict and prevent crime. From what I have heard it sounds more like Xi Jinping that Musk!

As the season turns, so does the weather. It is times like these that I am thankful for a posting in the southern hemisphere. Stay safe and warm wherever you are, and do click to follow.

Yours, James.