And, as always, for being so well informed and acquainted with the background story. It's certainly there.
I should have included in the excerpt above that, despite being invited, the Mayor of Buenos Aires did not attend. Nor, despite being invited, did he attend the recent unveiling of the Memorial to the ESMA Detention Center Disappeared (for those not familiar, the ESMA was by far the largest detention center during the Dirty War of the 1970s with at least 5,000 killed there).
It stands to reason though: in the case of the cultural center because Macri shuttered 20 cultural centers last year for purely political reasons, while sharply increasing city subsidies to parochial schools and spending on publicity and his party. And in the case of the ESMA memorial because his party, the PRO, was itself named in honor the dictatorship at the time (known in Argentina as the Proceso) and because he himself considers human rights "a scam" despite being kidnapped for ransom as a young man by a CIA-trained police special unit. Stockholm syndrome, perhaps?
This brat, currently making his second try for the presidency, has become a real media darling among the U.S. far right. And why not? He has, after all, quadrupled the municipal debt - much as the GOP hypocritically touts "fiscal conservatism" while winking at gargantuan contractor fraud and record deficits (just as Macri has).
I'm pretty sure these underhanded shows of support for the 1976 dictatorship -which, as you know, was vocally supported by the GOP- is no doubt contributing to Macri's ongoing bromance with the op-ed shills in the U.S. business press. And if so, I suppose attending the inaugural of the third or fourth largest cultural center in the world right in his city was just too much to ask.
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