Buenos Aires Herald 
President Javier Milei transformed the Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI, by its Spanish acronym) into a secretariat directly under his orders by decree, granting intelligence services a higher hierarchy and more power. It will go back to being called State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE), a name it had for decades while being accused of corruption and illegal endeavors.
A communiqué from the President’s Office published Monday night justified the decision, saying that the intelligence agency’s role has been “unnatural for decades,” accusing it of using its resources for what it called “spurious purposes, such as internal espionage, influence peddling, and political and ideological persecution.”
The new SIDE will be in charge of the national intelligence system. Sergio Neiffert, who has been running the AFI for the past month after former director Silvestre Sívori was forced to leave, will be in charge of it.
Sívori resigned following the steps of former Chief of Staff Nicolás Posse, whom he was close to. According to press reports, Milei had asked Posse and Sívori to resign over accusations that they spied on other members of his administration.
The SIDE will control four agencies with different tasks aimed at “transforming and modernizing the intelligence service.”
The agencies will be the National Security Agency, the Federal Cybersecurity Agency, the Internal Affairs Agency and the Argentine Intelligence Service — the latter’s acronym is SIA, pronounced the same way as the CIA in Spanish. Its role will be to compile strategic information from around the world and collaborate with foreign intelligence agencies.
According to the government’s communiqué, these modifications “will allow the consolidation of a strategic and modern vision and guarantee a balance between the agencies” while “keeping away any personal or partisan interests, as well as those who are against making the country great.”
The President’s Office account on X shared logos of each agency, which include imagery resembling United States iconography such as a bald eagle and the All-Seeing Eye present on the 1 dollar bill.
The spying agency was first created by former President Juan Domingo Perón in 1946 as a State Informations Coordination (CIDE). Over the years, its name changed several times, but maintained a secretariat status from 1955 to 2015.
The SIDE acronym first appeared with the coup against Perón in 1955, but the name was State Information Secretariat at the time. It aimed to investigate Peronists and communists. It was later turned into the State Intelligence Secretariat and in 2005, during Néstor Kirchner’s presidency, was transformed into Intelligence Secretariat (SI) until 2015.
The AFI was created that year after former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner proposed a bill that was later passed in Congress.
Its history is plagued with obscurity. It played a crucial role in compiling information about people forcibly disappeared during the last military dictatorship and even engaged in kidnapping and torture.
In 2019, its former head, Hugo Anzorreguy, was found guilty of being involved in a cover-up of the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center and received a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence. The SIDE was also looked into for its role in investigating the attack.
In 2000, a corruption scandal broke out after former SIDE head Fernando de Santibañes was accused of bribing members of the Senate as a key bill was being discussed.