Former Argentinean President Néstor Kirchner, husband of the country’s current President Christina Fernández de Kirchner, resigns as leader of the Justicialist Party after losing his congressional race in Buenos Aires province. According to exit polls, President Fernández de Kirchner’s party could lose its majority control in Congress.

The police chief of Kandahar, Afghanistan, is killed in a gun battle with U.S.-trained armed guards from a private security company at the office of the provincial attorney general. At least 41 of the armed guards are arrested and ordered to face a military trial in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

Five of nine Iranians employed by the British Embassy in Tehran are released after being investigated by the Iranian government. British foreign secretary David Miliband called the arrests “harassment and intimidation of a kind which is quite unacceptable.”

Albanian citizens vote in their seventh parliamentary election since the end of communist rule in 1992, with exit polls indicating victory for current Prime Minister Sali Berisha over Edi Rama, mayor of the Albanian capital of Tirana. The main foreign election observers, the Organization for Security and Cooperation report some campaign violations.

The nationalization of the ten funds would signal the end of Argentina’s private pension system, created in 1994 by then-president Carlos Menem. This private alternative to the state pension system currently administers the retirement accounts of 9.5 million depositors (one-fourth of Argentina’s population of 40 million).

The value of the funds’ investments has fallen 40 percent on average this year, and President Kirchner said that the move was necessary to protect retirees and workers. This sentiment was echoed by Amando Boudo, Executive Director of the National Social Security Administration who said that “the government’s only motivation to carry out this measure was to rescue our future and current pensioners from uncertainty.”

But critics say that the government is grabbing for money amid escalating debts, falling commodity prices and tax revenues, and global financial trouble. Argentina has been largely shut out of international capital markets since 2001, when it defaulted on bonds worth $95 billion, the largest sovereign-debt default in history. 2001 was also the last time the government sought to tap workers’ savings to help finance debt payments, freezing savings accounts and converting dollar-deposits into pesos.

In response to President Kirschner’s announcement, Argentina’s main stock index, the Merval, tumbled twenty percent on Tuesday and Wednesday — the biggest two-day drop since 1990.

WIDE  ANGLE surveyed the damage of Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis in The Empty ATM, following one woman’s struggle to recover her savings and a novel television game show that offered contestants a job amid widespread unemployment.

In July 1994, an explosion in Buenos Aires ripped through the Argentine-Jewish Mutual Association, a Jewish community center known by its Spanish acronym, AMIA. The suicide bombing killed 85 people in what was the deadliest anti-Semitic attack since World War II. The Lebanese group Hezbollah has been blamed for the attack, and officials in Argentina have accused Iran of backing the bombing. The AMIA bombing took place two years after another suicide bombing for which Hezbollah is suspected: an explosives-laden car crashed into the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and killed 29, injured more than 200, and also destroyed the embassy, a Catholic church, and a school.

In December 2001, the Argentinian government defaulted on $155 billion in public debt. Since then, this once-wealthy country has gone through five presidents and watched its currency fall by more than 70 percent. How do people survive in a broken economy? The solutions range from the ingenious — barter clubs where members can exchange goods and services without money — to the brutal, including outbreaks of rioting. With the most basic government services now only a memory and the army camped around the capital, how can the people of Argentina begin to put their society back together? What does a financial meltdown look like? And where do American interests or responsibilities lie?