Just days after succeeding her husband as President of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (right) complained in a televised speech last week:
There is some garbage in international politics that holds back development and seriousness in international relationships.
The cause for her concern? The arrest and filing of 
federal criminal charges against a U.S. citizen, Guido Alejandro Antonini Wilson of Miami, Florida, and 4 noncitizens, all alleged to have been smuggling into Argentina $800,000 in cash, found stuffed in a suitcase on Antonini's arrival in August at the Buenos Aires airport.
federal criminal charges against a U.S. citizen, Guido Alejandro Antonini Wilson of Miami, Florida, and 4 noncitizens, all alleged to have been smuggling into Argentina $800,000 in cash, found stuffed in a suitcase on Antonini's arrival in August at the Buenos Aires airport.U.S. prosecutors say that the 5 were acting on behalf of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and so they've charged them with "conspiring to act as agents of the Venezuelan government within the United States, without having notified the attorney general" of the United States.
The purported destination for the cash? The campaign coffers of then-presidential candidate Fernández, who played the gender card in crying foul:
'This president may be a woman, but she’s not going to allow herself to be pressured,' Mrs. Kirchner said in a televised speech. She said she would 'continue affirming our friendship with all Latin American countries and also with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.'
Well and good, but scarcely an answer to the law of the case. President Fernández seems unaware of various principles by which a state may exercise extraterritorial criminal jurisdiction -- principles that the United States, in particular, has employed quite expansively, to combat a host of transnational offenses, such as drug trafficking, money laundering, terrorism, and public corruption. In this case that exercise surely would seem justified with regard to the U.S. citizen, and likely as to the others, given that a part of the conduct at issue is alleged to have taken place inside the United States. The case thus would seem noncontroversial as a matter of law.
Politics, of course, is a whole 'nother thing.
(Incidentally, Fernández is not the only public figure less than perfectly schooled in this law. For a very different example of the problem, see our colleague Roger Alford's transnational criminal law critique of the steroids-in-baseball report here.)
