City Mayor Mauricio Macri tossed his hat into the 2011 presidential ring by saying that it would be a “boyhood dream” to face off against ex-president Néstor Kirchner next year.

Macri’s candidacy comes immediately after Vice-President Julio Cobos said more or less the same thing over the weekend (although Cobos had already told the Herald on December 23 that he intended to run in 2011).

“Who wouldn’t want to go into a runoff against Kirchner?” asked Macri rhetorically, arguing that whichever opposition candidate made the runoff would “win for sure ... that’s obvious,” given the ex-president’s highly negative image.

“Kirchner could never win a second round,” he insisted. At no point did he consider the possibility of current President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner running for re-election.

At a press conference in Parque Patricios, the mayor said: “We are building a candidacy.”

In the Peronist camp, dissident Congressmen Felipe Solá and Francisco de Narváez (who defeated Kirchner’s list in Buenos Aires province in last June’s mid-term elections), also have their hats in the ring, as has ex-president Eduardo Duhalde.

Clearly playing for the middle ground, the brand-new candidate Macri also used the press conference to disown PRO centre-right party colleague Diego Guelar’s call for an amnesty for the crimes of the 1976-83 military dictatorship to be put to a referendum.

“I’m in favour of trying absolutely everything which happened in the past and any kind of murderer must pay the consequences,” said Macri, who however argued that Guelar’s stance had been misrepresented, claiming that his aim was to “reconcile our tragic past with a broad amnesty law once all the trials in progress had been completed.

Guelar’s initiative (proposed last week in the closing days of 2009) was rejected across almost the entire political spectrum, including various members of PRO. Yesterday human rights lawyer Rodolfo Yanzón added his voice, pointing out that an amnesty means that crimes not only go unpunished but are forgotten, and that crimes against humanity are denied any statute of limitations.

Former ambassador to Washington Guelar (currently PRO’s international relations secretary) had argued in his statement last Wednesday that human rights depend on “their full exercise ... by all inhabitants of our country,” thus making it necessary to produce a broad amnesty law to “reconcile our tragic past.”

“Pardon is not to wipe out memory or avoid the judgement of history, it is to apply our Judaeo-Christian values to the service of reconciliation and the construction of a better future‘, Guelar’s statement also said.
Herald staff with agencies