The Argentine government’s Digital Communications Director, the 27-year-old Juan Pablo Carreira, has caused a diplomatic incident with China whose repercussions are still being felt. Carreira, a social media fanatic whose specialty is deploying bots and trolls to attack President Javier Milei’s perceived enemies, issued a message on X on Sept. 2, for which he used his alias “Juan Doe” rather than from his official account, blaming China for the flooding disaster in Nepal. Reported by Página 12, the posting charged that a “hydroelectric plant next to a glacier on the border with Nepal, combined with the typical failures of [Chinese] state-run industrial management, led to the largest collapse of a civil engineering structure on record. This joins the ranks of the greatest humanitarian disasters caused by the Communist Party’s management of industrial activity in history…Communism kills. The Communist Party, disguised as a ‘businessman,’ kills.”
China’s angry response was immediate. The spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Buenos Aires issued a sharply worded statement saying that while China and Nepal are working together in search and rescue operations to respond to the flood catastrophe, and have conducted joint investigations to determine its cause, “a certain Argentine official ‘motivated by biased ideological prejudices maliciously spreads rumors to defame the Chinese Communist Party and smear China’s international image.” China “absolutely” rejects these statements and demanded Carreira “immediately retract his statements.” The embassy also warned that this incident could have serious consequences for bilateral relations.
In Beijing, the Foreign Ministry called an “urgent” meeting with Argentine ambassador Marcelo Suárez Salvia, but as he was on vacation, the embassy’s second-highest-ranking diplomat, Alberto Simunovich, appeared to hear the Foreign Ministry’s “strong complaint” about the X posting and also about other provocative and hostile behavior by the Milei government, which are causing increasing bilateral tensions. The Foreign Ministry complained that Chinese companies are excluded from bidding on international projects in Argentina and also pointed to the outrageous interference by U.S. ambassador to Argentina Peter Lamelas, who threatened to revoke the visas of executives at the Cooperative for Public and Community Services (CALF), the largest electricity distributor in Patagonia, unless they stopped using Huawei technology.
