Silent, but seething

PROTESTS in Argentina are normally clamorous affairs, raucous with the din of pot-banging, drum-beating and slogan-shouting. The huge march on February 18th, one month after the death of Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor who had accused the president of trying to hide Iran’s complicity in Argentina’s worst terrorist act, took place in near silence. Some 400,000 people walked in pouring rain from Congress, past Mr Nisman’s former office to the presidential palace. They carried signs demanding “truth” and “justice” for Mr Nisman, who was found shot dead in his bathroom, and for the 85 victims of the 1994 bombing of a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires.

The federal prosecutors who had organised the march in honour of their fallen colleague called for silence in the hope that their protest would rise above politics. That was naive. Mr Nisman had accused the president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, of a crime. Among the most prominent marchers were her fiercest critics. They included Mauricio Macri and Sergio Massa, two of the main candidates to succeed her in this year’s presidential election. The marchers were joined by the farmers’ lobby, whose clash with Ms Fernández over agricultural taxes nearly led to her downfall in 2008. Several of the prosecutors in charge of the protest had led investigations of alleged corruption by Ms Fernández and her husband, Néstor Kirchner, who preceded her as president and died in 2010.