Buenos Aires city mayor Mauricio Macri has appointed Jorge Palacios, a disgraced  former Argentine Federal Police officer suspected of involvement in the cover up of the AMIA massacre, to be the head of the city’s first autonomous police force. Such is the strength of the suspicions attaching to Palacios’s role in the aftermath of the AMIA attack that State Prosecutor Albert Nisman is believed to be on the point of indicting him on charges of having warned a suspect , Kanoore Edul,  that he was  under investigation and that his home was about to be raided by the police. Speaking for one of the groups representing victims of the attack, Sergio Burstein stated his “complete  rejection” of the appointment and described it as “an insult to the dead.”

The city of Buenos Aires has long been policed by a division of the Argentine Federal Police and has never had a law enforcement agency of its own. Macri - think pocket Berlusconi, without the charisma or statesmanship implied by that comparison - won the 2007 city election on a platform that included a commitment to setting up an autonomous police force for the city of Buenos Aires.

If anyone thought  that contempt for Jews was the exclusive province of the left in Argentina they now have their answer. Macri likes to sell himself as  the new technocratic, post-ideological face of the right but it’s obvious that his core beliefs don’t much differ from those of his obtuse, thick-necked, racist and more honest predecessors.