President Javier Milei has sacked Rodolfo Barra, the attorney general of Argentina’s Treasury, bringing forward his widely rumoured dismissal.
Barra had reportedly been summoned to a meeting on Monday after issuing a ruling that Milei administration officials felt ran contrary to its budget-slashing approach to public spending.
Eventually, the Casa Rosada decided not to wait, sacking him before the weekend began.
“The government has just asked for the resignation of Rodolfo Barra, the National Treasury Prosecutor,” Presidential Spokesperson Manuel Adorni confirmed in a post on the X social network.
The row began last Wednesday when Barra issued a ruling that government officials objected to.
According to government sources cited by the Noticias Argentinas news agency, the Treasury attorney general backed a Justice Ministry employee who had filed a legal petition challenging a decision related to salaries and employee incentives.
The decision angered the government, though other sources said the Casa Rosada was unhappy at the amount of time Barra spent in Argentina. He has a home in Spain and travels frequently to Punta del Este in Uruguay, they said.
The government has not yet announced who will replace Barra, but local reports say Ricardo Manuel Rojas, a lawyer and doctor in economic history, is one of the frontrunners.
Rojas is the author of La inflación como delito (“Inflation as a crime”), a book which Milei considers to be recommended reading. He has a judicial background and served several years as legal secretary of the Supreme Court (between 1986 and 1993) and as a criminal judge in Buenos Aires.
Barra, a lawyer with considerable experience, held several government posts in the 1990s before being dismissed in controversial circumstances.
A former justice of the Supreme Court, he served as justice minister from 1994 to 1996 under then-president Carlos Menem before an investigation uncovered links to pro-Nazi groups and highlighted anti-Semitic claims.
He was forced to resign amid public outcry that ensued after a photo of him as a teenager, with his arm outstretched in a Nazi-style salute, was published by Noticias news magazine.
His efforts to apologise away the fact he was a member of an ultranationalist, allegedly anti-Semitic movement as a youth, failed.
While serving as justice minister for then-president Carlos Menem, then-economy minister Domingo Cavallo even accused Barra of delaying investigations into the terrorist attacks on the Israeli Embassy and the AMIA Israeli-Argentine Association Jewish community centre.
His appointment to the Treasury post in December 2023, tasked with counselling and representing the state in legal matters, met with dismay from civic associations.
Opposition politicians urged Milei to reconsider but the La Libertad Avanza leader refused to back down.
– TIMES/NA/PERFIL
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