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An Argentine official turned a partisan opinion into a problem between states. Social media allows people to write in seconds; diplomacy sometimes needs years to repair what someone writes in seconds.
There is a small difference in wording, but an enormous difference in consequences, between being a social-media user and being a government official.
Juan Pablo Carreira, Argentina’s National Director of Digital Communication and better known online as Juan Doe, appears to have forgotten that distinction when he decided to blame the Chinese Communist Party for the catastrophe in Nepal.
Communism, capitalism, state-owned companies, glaciers, dams and economic models can all be debated for hours. There is nothing wrong with that. What is considerably harder to defend is turning a tragedy that is still unfolding, while hundreds of families search for missing relatives, into ammunition for an ideological battle.
And doing so while holding public office.
Juan Doe is entitled to his opinions. So is Juan Pablo Carreira. But Argentina’s National Director of Digital Communication has one small institutional complication: the Argentine Republic is sitting behind his keyboard.
China understood that perfectly well.
The Chinese Embassy in Buenos Aires responded publicly, rejected the accusations and called on the Argentine official to abandon unfounded speculation and refrain from politicising or exploiting natural disasters in ways that could damage relations between the two countries.
In other words, Beijing stopped arguing with a social-media user and started speaking to Argentina.
That is the real issue.
The Himalayan disaster has left more than a thousand people dead and thousands missing. Available reports attribute the catastrophe to a massive glacial collapse in Nepal. There are, naturally, scientific, environmental and even political questions to be asked about risk management in a region where retreating glaciers represent a growing threat.
But an investigation is one thing.
An ideological verdict issued from a mobile phone is quite another.
It is also worth remembering something elementary: China is hardly a distant country on Argentina’s economic map.
It is one of Argentina’s major trading partners, a crucial market for Argentine products, a significant supplier of industrial goods and an important player in investment and infrastructure.
Buenos Aires may disagree with Beijing —as any sovereign state may— over trade, investment, human rights, geopolitics or anything else.
But throwing a stone on X and expecting diplomacy to sweep up the broken glass afterwards is difficult to describe as foreign policy.
This episode also reveals one of the peculiarities of contemporary political communication.
For years, social networks were treated almost as extraterritorial territory, a place where exaggeration, insult and provocation could be deployed without much consequence.
That worked while the participants were activists, commentators or anonymous accounts.
The problem begins when those same characters are given an office, an official position, a government appointment and a public salary.
At that point, the avatar acquires official letterhead.
And a post that yesterday might have triggered an argument between users can today trigger a statement from an embassy.
This is not an argument for silent officials or diplomats wearing velvet gloves. Governments have every right to defend their ideas and even to confront other governments politically.
But precisely because an official represents a country, he should know when he is speaking, what he is speaking about and —a detail once considered rather important— whether he actually knows what he is talking about.
Diplomacy possesses an old virtue that social media sometimes regards almost as a defect:
thinking before pressing the button.
Argentina already has enough economic, commercial and international problems without manufacturing additional ones free of charge.
Perhaps, then, before handing the keys to a nation’s communications to digital gladiators, it would be useful to remind them of one simple rule of the profession:
once you enter the Casa Rosada, you may certainly keep your X account.
What you cannot keep is the illusion that you are still posting only on your own behalf.
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Sources consulted: AFP, Reuters, the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Argentina, and international media.