BuenosAiresHerald.com journalist Damián Pachter, who left Argentina on Saturday morning after claiming he feared for his life, confirmed yesterday that he has arrived in Tel Aviv, Israel after flying from Buenos Aires.
“Safe in Tel Aviv. Thank you everybody. We’ll talk soon,” he wrote in his personal Twitter account.
Pachter had attracted attention after using his personal account to break the news that AMIA special prosecutor Alberto Nisman had been found dead on January 18.
Last Thursday, he said he had to leave the BuenosAiresHerald.com offices in a hurry, without telling anyone that he was not planning on returning. Hours later, he told news outlets he was being followed and felt threatened.
Yesterday, the journalist — who is also an Israeli citizen — published a lengthy column in Israeli daily Haaretz detailing his reasons for abandoning Argentina so abruptly.
In a story entitled “Why I fled Argentina after breaking the story of Alberto Nisman’s death,” Pachter referred to “the craziest 48 hours of my life.”
The journalist expanded his first-person account of how he broke the news, saying that two things stood in his mind during the night of January 18 — “my source’s safety and people’s right to know what happened that day, though not necessarily in that order.”
“The information was so solid I never doubted my source, despite my one or two colleagues who doubted me because I only had 420 Twitter followers — a number now eclipsing 10,000,” Pachter said.
‘A kind of a coded message’
“The following days were marked by a government trying to create an official story. First, the head of state suggested a ‘suicide hypothesis,’ then a mysterious murder. They of course were not to blame. In anything,” Pachter wrote in his 1,100-word column.
“That week I received several messages from one of my oldest and best sources. He urged me to visit him, but in those crazy days I underestimated his proposal.”
“On Friday I was working at the BuenosAiresHerald.com newsroom when a colleague from the BBC urged me to look at the state news agency’s story on Nisman’s death. The piece had some serious typos but the message was even stranger: The agency quoted a supposed tweet of mine that I never wrote.”
Pachter argued the tweet “was a kind of coded message.”“So I bounced it off my friend, who said: ‘Get out now and go to Retiro,’ Buenos Aires’ central bus station. ‘And come visit me. You have to leave the city.’ It was around 8:30pm. I was very lucky: when I arrived a bus would be leaving in two minutes. Where that bus was going I’ll never reveal either.”
“After several hours on the road, I arrived at the bus station, where I remained for a couple of hours. It turns out this was a big mistake: I think that was the place someone started watching me. But I didn’t realize it back then,” he continued.
“I didn’t want to stay too long in any one place, so I walked over to a gas-station joint nearby. My friend contacted me and said: ‘I’ll be there in 20 minutes.’”
“I was sitting around there for two hours or so when a very strange person came in. He wore jeans, a jeans jacket and Ray-Ban sunglasses. I noticed him immediately but stayed where I was. He was sitting two tables from me.”
According to Pachter, his friend asked him if he had noticed “the intelligence guy” behind him.The journalist’s friend “he took a picture of the intelligence officer, who left five minutes later. I have that picture here with me.”“I then had to consider the best thing to do, because when an Argentine intelligence agent is on your tail, it’s never good news. He didn’t just want to have a coffee with me, that’s for sure.”
‘I had the feeling someone was after me’
“In any case, the decision came quick: I had to leave the country immediately. So I contacted one of my best friends, who got scared but understood the situation. We had to do it quickly, and I’m sure his efficiency saved my life. I will forever be grateful to him,” Pachter said.
“So I did it: I bought a ticket from Buenos Aires, to Montevideo, Uruguay, to Madrid to Tel Aviv.I had to keep a low profile in order to get by the security forces. So I went back to the Retiro bus station — the scariest part of that long day. I was sure that if something happened, it would happen at the train station, a very dangerous place at night.”
“I had the feeling someone was after me and I’d get shot from some strange angle. But then I suspected my taxi driver even more. I figured he’d stray and take me off somewhere.”
Pachter said he wrote text messages “to my two best colleagues, a friend and my mom,” telling them they could meet him at Buenos Aires Airport.
“I couldn’t spend any time on the phone because I was being surveilled,” he added.“When my mother arrived she of course cried but remained calm. We discussed a few things and I told her to leave. Then my journalist friends came and we did an interview that has already hit Argentina’s top newspapers. I was flying back home, to Tel Aviv, as I always wanted to.”
As for his possible return, the journalist said: “I have no idea when I’ll be back in Argentina; I don’t even know if I want to. What I do know is that the country where I was born is not the happy place my Jewish grandparents used to tell me stories about.”
“After I left Argentina I found out that the government was still publishing wrong information about me on social media. The Twitter feed of Casa Rosada, the Argentine presidential palace, posted the details of the airline ticket I had bought, and claimed that I intended to return to Argentina by February 2 — in other words, I hadn’t really fled the country. In fact, my return date is in December.”
“Argentina has become a dark place led by a corrupt political system. I still haven’t figured out everything that has happened to me over the past 48 hours. I never imagined my return to Israel would be like this.”
Considering media reports, the Herald’s parent company Grupo Ámbito expressed concern about the situation and said it was looking forward to speaking to Pachter and assisting him in any way necessary.
Pachter is a staff member of the digital content side of the Buenos Aires Herald, which is under the leadership of the Digital Content Editor of the Ámbito Group — that also includes Ámbito.com.
However, neither the Digital Content Editor of the Ámbito Group, Pablo Jiménez, nor the Editor-in-Chief of the print edition of the Herald, Sebastián Lacunza, were aware of the threats against Pachter
