At least three people, including the gunman’s girlfriend, have now been arrested in connection with the attack on Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who is also a former president.
Yet from the start, much of the conversation in Argentina has centered not on who pulled the trigger, what the motive was or what should be done about it — but on whether someone had actually tried to kill the vice president at all.
A sizable portion of Argentines seem to believe that Mrs. Kirchner’s life was never actually in danger. Instead, many suggest that the entire assassination attempt was an elaborate hoax, even though many of the claims being floated are baseless.
In the days following the attack, at least two-fifths of the posts on social media about Mrs. Kirchner expressed doubts about the legitimacy of the assassination attempt, according to two separate analyses of millions of posts. At the same time, an online survey of 1,650 Argentines found that more than half said they believed the attack was staged.
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