The Law Exists. The Problem Is That No One Applies It
Argentina has the legal instruments to prosecute and convict spies. Article 214 of the Penal Code establishes penalties of ten to twenty-five years or life imprisonment for treason against the homeland, plus absolute disqualification for life. Law 13.985 provides for life imprisonment for anyone acting on behalf of a foreign power. The text is clear and the penalties are severe. However, Andriashvili and Yakovenko were publicly identified by the SIDE in June 2025 and remain free without formal charges. The Dultsev case documented an active SVR network for a decade with six suspects linked to the GRU, none of whom has been formally charged in Argentina. The drone over Congress was filed without consequences. The report about La Compañía reached the Public Prosecutor's Office six months after the SIDE reported it. Manuel Rocha, the former U.S. ambassador and a confessed agent of Cuba, was never investigated in Argentina despite his documented influence on domestic policy for decades. The problem is not the law: it's the system that should apply it.
The first structural knot is the disconnection between those who produce intelligence and those who can turn it into a criminal cause. The National Counterintelligence Agency can identify a foreign agent, document their network, and map their contacts, yet it still lacks the capacity to directly judicialize that knowledge. The bridge between the intelligence report and the formal charges depends on the Public Prosecutor's Office: on its willingness, its timing, and its areas of influence. When that bridge takes six months — as happened with La Compañía, the window to act closes, the evidence degrades, and the actors reorganize. This is not a management accident. It is an institutional architecture that produces impunity as a foreseeable result.
The second problem is deeper and more uncomfortable: the Argentine judiciary has a documented history of dissolving sensitive cases when the defendants have political connections. The prosecutions of Gustavo Arribas and Silvia Majdalani for espionage during the Macri era progressed to a certain point and then diluted. Investigations into Kirchnerist espionage have accumulated years of files without a single firm conviction. The pattern is not random. When the defendants have ties to sectors with parliamentary representation, the incentives not to investigate become structural. The phone call as a mechanism to file away cases is neither metaphor nor speculation: it is a practice with documented cases that the very operators of the system acknowledge in private but rarely in public. Argentina does not have a specialized prosecution office for national security with real autonomy. What exists are generalist prosecutors who receive complex cases without specific technical training and, in some cases, without the will to act against targets with political protection.
The third problem is technical but with direct practical consequences: the Argentine Penal Code does not have specific provisions for modern forms of foreign interference. There are no autonomous offenses for financing political campaigns by foreign powers, for coordinated influence operations in the media, or for cyber espionage as an independent legal category. When the SIDE detects a coordinated misinformation network from Moscow or Havana, prosecutors must fit those behaviors into generic categories — illicit association, classic espionage — with a legal fit that defenders can challenge relatively easily. Australia acted in 2018 with its foreign interference laws, criminalizing interference as an autonomous offense with gradations depending on severity and without needing to demonstrate consummated harm. Argentina has nothing equivalent, and as long as that does not change, every case in this area will start with a structural procedural disadvantage that favors those operating in the shadows.
A state that identifies spies, publicly names them, and then leaves them free without consequences is not poorly managing the problem: it is sending a message. That message — that impunity is guaranteed — is, in itself, the greatest harm to national security. Not because spies celebrate it in private, but because it degrades the one thing a sovereign state cannot lose: the ability to defend itself. Where there are no consequences, permissiveness exists, and where permissiveness exists, the moral degradation of the institutions that must protect the nation thrives.
What President Milei Can Do
The honest answer has three layers: what is directly in the hands of the Executive, what requires Congress, and what depends on political decisions that Milei has so far avoided making. The combination of the three defines whether Argentina moves from naming spies to prosecuting them.
What the President can do without needing a single new law is more than what the current paralysis suggests. Milei has more executive power in intelligence matters than any president since the democratic restoration. He demonstrated this on December 31, 2025, with DNU 941/2025, which reformed the entire Intelligence Law without going through Congress. He can do it again. What is lacking is not legal power: it is political will. First, he can instruct the Ministry of Justice to formally elevate the hierarchy of active espionage cases and press institutionally so that they are not shelved due to bureaucratic inertia. Second, he can use the already initiated process of enabling two hundred judicial vacancies and sixty-five prosecutors to create, without new legislation, a specialized unit in national security with a specific mandate, its own budget, and real protection against political interference. Third, the very DNU 941/2025 requires all heads of state agencies to implement counterintelligence measures: if an official receives a formal alert from the ANC and does not act, Milei can sanction them administratively today. No one has exercised that power. Fourth, the strategic alliance with the United States presented by the government to Congress includes a component of shared intelligence. Operational cooperation with the FBI and CIA in cases of Russian and Cuban espionage does not require a law: it is a working agreement that can translate into direct pressure on concrete cases, as already occurred with the Rocha case in the Southern District of Florida (Infobae, 2025).
On the legislative front, Milei announced in the Legislative Assembly of March 2026 a reform of the Penal Code with harsher penalties and greater coverage of effective prison time. This project is the concrete opportunity to incorporate the criminalization of foreign interference as an independent penal figure — covering the covert financing of narratives, coordinated influence operations in the media, and the manipulation of electoral processes by foreign powers — to create the penal type for willful institutional omission that allows for prosecuting officials who do not act when faced with formal espionage alerts, and to establish a regime of admissibility of evidence that allows intelligence produced by the ANC to be incorporated into the criminal process with clear judicial validation procedures. If these figures do not enter the penal reform of 2026, the next government will find them missing, and the cycle will continue.
But there is one decision that no decree can replace and that Milei has not yet made: separating the SIDE from the orbit of the internal politics of the Government. The current director of intelligence, Cristian Auguadra, was placed in office by presidential advisor Santiago Caputo after the traumatic departure of Sergio Neiffert in December 2025. An intelligence director who answers to a political operator has incentives to subordinate national security to electoral convenience. That is not a theoretical risk: it is the institutional history of the SIDE since its founding under various names and different governments. Real reform requires granting the intelligence director a fixed mandate with accountability to a bicameral commission with real oversight power, not to the direct chain of the President. There is also an ambiguity in the National Intelligence Plan that Milei himself must correct: the leaked document in 2025 defines as a focal point of interest for the SIDE those actors who erode trust in officials or manipulate public opinion, without distinguishing between foreign agents and local journalists or analysts who differ with the government. The same tool that should pursue the networks of La Compañía can be used to surveil those who denounce them. That ambiguity is not a drafting error: it is a decision. And only the President can reverse it.
What needs to happen is not primarily legislative. It is for the President to decide that national security weighs more than the convenience of maintaining intelligence as an internal power lever. That is the decision that defines whether everything else — the ANC, the DFI, the decrees, cooperation with Washington — is real architecture or institutional decoration.
Conclusion
Russian and Cuban operations in Argentina are not hypothetical or future scenarios. There are names in judicial accusations, amounts in leaked spreadsheets, and open files with assigned prosecutors. For the first time in many years, the Argentine state names actors, presents cases before justice, and coordinates actions with Western allies. But naming is not prosecuting, and prosecuting is not dismantling. Andriashvili and Yakovenko remain free. The logistics network supporting the Dultsev remains partially unidentified. The Cuban agents under diplomatic cover face no open judicial cases in Argentina.
Hybrid wars are difficult to win precisely because their battles do not have a visible front. There are no trenches to defend or territories to reclaim: there are narratives to control, documents to protect, and institutional cracks to close.
Argentina has been an operational field for powers that bet no one would look too closely for years. Now someone is looking. The question is whether they will act.
About the Author
William L. Acosta is a graduate of PWU and Alliance University. He is a retired police officer from the New York City police department, a former military officer of the United States Army, and the founder and CEO of Equalizer Private Investigations & Security Services Inc., an agency licensed in New York and Florida, with international projection. Since 1999, he has led investigations in narcotics, homicide, and missing persons cases, in addition to participating in criminal defense at both state and federal levels. A specialist in international and multi-jurisdictional cases, he has coordinated operations in North America, Europe, and Latin America.
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