Outgoing Argentine President Alberto Fernandez, who is due to end his term on December 10, claimed on Sunday that he had been anonymously threatened several times over the past year, while traveling aboard the presidential helicopter.
“When I was president, on two or three occasions, while traveling by helicopter (from the presidential palace) from Casa Rosada to (the official residence of) Olivos, (the laser point of) a riflescope is appeared inside the helicopter,” Alberto Fernandez told the Argentine weekly Perfil. “I don’t think the intention was to shoot down the helicopter. I don’t know. The intention was for me to get the message that there was a telescope pointed at the helicopter.” he added.
“We were silent”
Alberto Fernandez, who is to be succeeded in two weeks by the controversial ultraliberal Javier Milei, elected on November 19, specifies: “this has not happened to me just once, it has happened to me two, three or four times, and with my bodyguards we saw it, and we kept quiet, because we said to ourselves, ‘Let’s not make a problem of it’.”
These threats came “after” the failed assassination attempt on its vice-president Cristina Kirchner, in September 2022, added Alberto Fernandez but without providing precise dates. On September 1, 2022, an armed man targeted Cristina Kirchner in front of her home in Buenos Aires, but failed to fire. After this event, Alberto Fernandez said he was targeted “with a laser beam (…), someone with a weapon pointing the laser towards” the presidential helicopter.
“We must understand,” he told Perfil, that the families of political leaders “live constantly threatened on social networks or threatened by e-mail or threatened by WhatsApp, constantly.”