Argentine President Mocks Chinese Accents While on Trip to China

Statecraft! It’s a delicate art. But it shouldn’t take the ghost of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to tell you that racist accent mockery on Twitter doesn’t get you very far in diplomatic negotiations. Maybe somebody should inform Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, though.

Bloomberg reports that Fernández is in China to encourage investments in South America, noting that, “Argentina is relying on loans from China to bolster a currency that slumped 23 percent against the dollar last year amid the country’s second default in 13 years.” Her itinerary including a meeting with President Xi Jinpin. In short, she’s not really in the position to be pulling stunts like this:

“Did they only come for lice and petloleum,” Fernandez wrote in Spanish on her Twitter account. A minute later, she wrote “sorry, the levels of ridiculousness and absurdity are so high they can only be digested with humor.”

Maybe she was just trying to distract everyone from that dead prosecutor who just happened to have the draft of a warrant for her arrest lying around his house.