BUENOS AIRES—Argentina's relations with the U.S. hit a new bump as President Cristina Kirchner's foreign minister suggested that a U.S.-sponsored police-training program was teaching oppressive tactics to members of the Buenos Aires police force.
Analysts said Héctor Timerman's comments partly reflect an undercurrent of frustration in the Kirchner government that President Barack Obama will be sidestepping Argentina during a visit to El Salvador, Brazil and Chile next month. The flap is also a sign of the growing political tensions between the leftist Mrs. Kirchner and Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri, a conservative who looms as a rival candidate ahead of October presidential elections.
Mr. Timerman criticized Mr. Macri's decision to send two Buenos Aires police officers to the International Law Enforcement Academy in El Salvador. The academy is part of a global network of five academies established by President Bill Clinton in 1995 to improve coordination and training of foreign police in areas such as combating narcotics trafficking, money laundering and terrorism.
"As a [Buenos Aires resident] I'm frightened that Macri continues sending police to study 'antiterrorism' in courses taught and financed by the USA," Mr. Timerman wrote Wednesday on his Twitter account.
In subsequent comments to the local press, Mr. Timerman likened the Law Enforcement Academy to the U.S. Army's School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga., which trained a number of Latin American military officials who would later be implicated in human-rights abuses during the dictatorships that reigned during the 1970s and 1980s.
"In the past, they were dedicated to training the military in coup techniques and courses in torture and persecution of political enemies," Mr. Timerman said. "It seems to me that these are limits that we shouldn't cross."
Eugenio Burzaco, chief of the Buenos Aires metropolitan police, hit back at Mr. Timerman for a "foolish remark" that he said was insulting to the U.S., as well as to many other nations who send police to the academies. The El Salvador academy's website indicates that hundreds of law-enforcement officials from more than a score of countries in the hemisphere have received training there.
Mr. Burzaco said two members of Argentina's federal police are also training at the academy. Mr. Burazco said if Mr. Timerman's critique is correct, then "the federal government itself is sending [police] to a course where they supposedly torture."
Federal Security Minister Nilda Garré denied that federal police had taken antiterrorism courses at the academy.
Mr. Burzaco said terrorism training was essential for police in Buenos Aires, the site of bloody terrorist attacks in the 1990s against the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish community center. Neither the El Salvador academy nor the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires had any immediate comment.
The controversy comes amid Mr. Obama's move to skip Argentina on his planned regional visit in March, which critics of Mrs. Kirchner have seized on as a sign of Argentina's waning regional influence. While saying that relations between the U.S. and Argentina were "very good," Mr. Timerman previously suggested that Mr. Obama was skipping Argentina because Mrs. Kirchner was unwilling to compromise in areas such as trade and international security.
The relationship between Argentina and the U.S. has been rocky during most of the eight years Mrs. Kirchner and her late husband and predecessor Nestor Kirchner have governed the country.
But some analysts had said Mrs. Kirchner is more pragmatic than her late husband and that U.S.-Argentina relations would improve after his death from a heart attack in October. U.S. diplomats were encouraged that Mrs. Kirchner had worked during a summit of Latin American leaders in December to avoid condemnation of the U.S. over the WikiLeaks scandal.
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