Argentina: Lots of Scandal, Little Faith in System

Samantha Farjat, a star of Argentina’s reigning scandal, is the product of a subculture that has added a new verb to the local argot: To “Samanthasize” means to make frivolous.

Farjat inspired a hit song. A pay-per-call phone line tells her story. Her name is plastered on street signs. Youths clamor for her autograph, and protesters throw eggs at her. Tabloids and television talk shows are obsessed with this 22-year-old with her midriff-baring T-shirts and a distracted habit of chewing the antenna of her cellular phone.

“We have Samanthasized the media,” a bemused President Carlos Menem told journalists last week. “We have been talking about Samantha for two months. . . . What sells are scandals.”

The scandal centers on Guillermo Coppola, the manager of tormented soccer star Diego Maradona. Based on testimony by Farjat and other informants, Coppola was arrested on drug charges in October. The case spun out of control, spreading a web of intrigue that has entangled athletes, political figures, judges, police and habitues of the Buenos Aires club scene like Farjat.

“If you asked the computer to create a thriller, it would come up with the Coppola case,” said Miguel Rodriguez Arias, a television producer and political analyst. “It has all the ingredients: suspense, sex, drugs, connections in high places.”

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There are parallels to the O.J. Simpson saga: nonstop televised chatter, sports stars, prosecutorial blunders. But the Coppola affair is distinctively Argentine in that it involves national politics.

Beneath the voyeurism lies a crisis of confidence in the justice system, according to Luis Moreno Ocampo, who prosecuted Argentina’s former military dictators before becoming an anti-corruption consultant.

“Argentina is a country with a certain sophistication, a strong educational level and great support for democracy,” Moreno said. “But the institutions are weak.”

At times, Argentine public life resembles a scandal industry, grinding out high-profile cases on a weekly basis: an alleged multibillion-dollar scam in customs, allegations of multimillion-dollar bribes paid by IBM, accusations that politicians control judges.

The media swarmed the Coppola case because it offers glitz, crime and politics, Rodriguez said: “This is a genre in which shows are politicized and politics becomes a show.”

Coppola, 48, is a bronzed sports impresario who surrounds himself with flashy young women. He is a longtime friend of well-connected figures, including Menem’s personal secretary.

Coppola and Maradona were inseparable: They roamed nightclubs and visited the presidential estate together. Recently, the two traveled to a Swiss clinic after the soccer star announced that his longtime drug problem had flared up.

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Coppola is no stranger to notoriety. His name has surfaced in drug cases here and in Italy. He was investigated in Argentina in the 1994 murder of a nightclub owner who dined with Coppola hours before he was gunned down. Coppola was not charged, but the case remains open while Congress pursues a bribery investigation against the magistrate who investigated the murder.

Coppola also was swept up in an undercover drug operation by police in the province of Buenos Aires. Authorities said they found more than 400 grams of cocaine in his luxury apartment and accused him of running a ring that sold cocaine and the stimulant called Ecstasy.

There were powerful repercussions because of the connection to Maradona, whom Argentines adore like a gifted but troubled son. Politicians have exploited his aura ever since dictators used his soccer heroics to whip up nationalistic sentiment in the 1970s.

In this case, the irrepressible Maradona accused the governor of Buenos Aires province of going after Coppola to further his presidential ambitions.

The case grew steadily more confused, generating sub-scandals and transforming dubious characters into Kato Kaelin-style stars.

Enter Farjat. In a dramatic reversal, she accused the narcotics detectives who had infiltrated Coppola’s entourage of pressuring her into planting drugs and giving false testimony. The two detectives were accused of running up bills on a suspect’s confiscated cell phone, sleeping with the informants and planting evidence in other cases.

It was a severe blow to the prosecution: Weeks after they hustled Coppola into court, the undercover cops were themselves jailed.

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Meanwhile, Farjat enthralled Argentines with accounts of jet-setting and police misconduct. She engaged in televised spats with fellow prosecution witnesses who accuse her of drug dealing and loose morals. Her popularity soared.

“They tell me I’m an idol, a goddess, and I can’t believe it,” Farjat told an interviewer recently.

Commentators joined the Samantha stampede. “This young woman whose face bears the marks of an intense life and admits to using drugs and sleeping with police . . . always seems about to say something definitive about the relations between power, drugs and prostitution,” sociologist Luis Alberto Quevedo wrote in the newspaper Pagina 12.

Nora Mazziotti, a communications professor at the University of Buenos Aires, commented: “Everybody says it’s sleazy, but no one turns off the television. People watch these girls, who could be their daughters, and say, ‘They are the opposite of my daughters.’ In fact, they go to the same disco as my daughters.”

The drama reached a crescendo Thursday when an appellate court transferred the case to a federal court, ruling that the alleged crimes occurred in the federal jurisdiction of the capital. Some say this is the first step toward an acquittal engineered by political clout; others say Coppola was framed.

As for Farjat, TV viewers were asked by pollsters whether they thought she would go to jail, get married or star in a movie about her own life. Viewers chose the latter.

In response, Farjat grinned toothily and told an interviewer: “I think first I am going to get married. And then I’ll make the movie about my life.”