Natasha Niebieskikwiat
11/05/2020 7:53 PM
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 11/05/2020 7:53 PM
Former Vice Chancellor Eduardo Zuain is today the first candidate to lead the Argentine embassy in Moscow,
Clarín
learned
from high diplomatic sources.
Still, the Foreign Ministry has not yet confirmed it.
The “Chango” Zuaín, born in Santiago, is
one of the career ambassadors closest to former president Cristina Kirchner
, with whom he continues to talk today from his role as director of the Institute of the Foreign Service of the Nation (ISEN), where career diplomats are trained.
With which, if his departure abroad is confirmed, he should abandon the position he arrived at at the beginning of the year in replacement of Fabián Calle.
It is known that there were annoyances in the Government with the Foreign Ministry due to the vacuum in the Moscow embassy, at a time when the purchase of millions of doses of the Sputnik V vaccine was negotiated.
It so happens that the former ambassador Ricardo Lagorio and almost all the high positions of the embassy were brought back, which was almost empty.
Christinist
Alicia Castro resigned her appointment
there
last month
.
It had been proposed by Alberto Fernández but its specifications were never discussed in the Senate.
It was lowered, he argued, in disagreement with Argentine foreign policy.
It was after the government's decision to condemn the violation of human rights in Venezuela.
In this context, Deputy Minister Carla Vizzotti traveled to Russia to negotiate the vaccine.
Cristina met a week ago with the Russian ambassador Dmitry V. Feoktistov, and possibly there Zuain's name was put on the table.
By then, the former deputy María del Carmen Alarcón was also circulating as a “candidate”, who finally will not go to Russia.
A diplomat, linked to the former Santiago governor Gerardo Zamora, Zuain acquired a lot of experience as an ambassador to Italy between 1999 and 2006 and, from that year on, his contacts with Kirchnerism made his figure grow until he reached the vice chancellorship in the time of Héctor Timerman.
Zuain came to occupy that position on the recommendation of the Kolina group, which responded to Alicia Kirchner, governor of Santa Cruz and sister of the late former president Néstor Kirchner.
In this role he served during the last term of Cristina Kirchner, between 2011 and 2015. He is known to the Russian Foreign Ministry.
In 2017 Mauricio Macri sent him as
ambassador to Paraguay,
from where Elisa Carrió requested his return in a confusing episode in which Zuain was not finally involved.
That same year, Judge Claudio Bonadio prosecuted him as well as Cristina Kirchner and other former Kirchnerist officials in the case of the Memorandum with Iran, the file that was born with the complaint of Alberto Nisman in January 2015 and where the cover-up was denounced. for those suspected of blowing up the Jewish mutual in 1994, in an attack that killed 85 people.
That measure had fallen on Cristina, former Foreign Minister Timerman, former Legal and Technical Secretary Carlos Zannini, among others.
His judicial situation did not prevent him from continuing in diplomatic positions.
In March of this year, Zuain was appointed as director of the Foreign Service Institute of the Nation at the Foreign Ministry.
It is the key body for the selection, training and incorporation of Argentine diplomatic officials.
In this last time it was also said that Zuain could go to the embassy in Cuba, at the request of the island.
Or that it could also go to Bolivia, now that President Alberto Fernández restarted relations with the government of Luis Arce, in whose inauguration he will be present.
But for Cuba the name of the Kirchnerist Marcelo Cima is also spinning.
Recently, in the talk called "Argentina and the Pandemic: Certainties and Uncertainties in the New International Context", Zuain spoke of global politics and assured that "there is no world power center", but rather "we are living an economic and commercial war between the USA and China, and a growth of Russia ”.
He also spoke of “a weakening of multilateral organizations, such as the United Nations, of integration schemes” and that “the pandemic showed that they cannot work.
Borders were closed without some countries notifying others ”, he added.
