By Ingrid Bachmann
Press groups, opposition politicians, and Jewish community leaders demanded that economics minister Amado Boudou retract his statements to two journalists, La Razón reports. According to Télam, the minister has since recanted, saying that his remarks were inappropriate.
Bordou was in Washington, D.C. for an International Monetary Fund (IMF) summit, when he was confronted by two journalists from La Nación and Clarín, two newspapers that are in conflict with the government, EFE explains. “You are like those who helped clean the Nazi gas chambers,” he told the reporters, calling them “IMF-addicts” who should stop acting as "accomplices" of their employers, Perfil explains.
The Argentine Journalism Forum (FOPEA) called it “an unacceptable attack” and said that the statements “trivialized one of the biggest atrocities of the 20th century.”
According to Ámbito, in a Tuesday meeting with the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations (DAIA), Boudou admitted that he used “inappropriate metaphors” and should not have compared the Holocaust to the political situation in Argentina. However, the minister insisted that at the IMF meeting, “the dailies Clarín and La Nación were saying things that weren’t true,” Télam adds.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
