Cristina & Obama Hug at G20 Meeting in Pittsburgh

It’s long been reported that President Cristina Fernández has been seeking – unsuccessfully, so far – a one-on-one meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama.

While Obama has met with regional leaders like Lula in Brazil and Bachelet in Chile, he has yet to sit down with Fernández.

There are reasons for this.

Among other things, the successive Kirchner administrations have trashed U.S. policies and American personalities on multiple occasions.

In 2007, former president Néstor Kirchner invited Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez – long a declared enemy of U.S. interests – to hold an anti-American rally in Argentina as former U.S. President George W. Bush was visiting neighboring Montevideo for a meeting with Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez.

Chávez is the same Kirchner ally who previously had given a speech at the United Nations that was extremely critical of Bush. As CNN noted at the time:

“The devil came here yesterday,” Chavez said, referring to Bush, who addressed the world body during its annual meeting. “And it smells of sulfur still today.”

Despite these comments, Kirchner gave Chávez an even bigger podium from which to denounce the U.S. He gave Chávez an entire stadium to do so. With Kirchner’s help, Chávez filled the stadium with anti-American zealots.

Say what you will about American foreign policy at the time, giving Chávez such a podium was hardly the gesture of a seasoned statesman who was concerned about improving relations with the U.S.

Before all of this, in 2005, there was also a Summit of the Americas meeting that turned out to be something of a diplomatic disaster for the American president. While at the Summit, Bush watched his goal of creating a hemispheric-wide free trade agreement go down the tubes amid opposition from Kirchner and other leaders.

The goal, and the American government’s means of achieving it, may or may not have been smartly pursued.

Regardless, U.S. diplomats partly blamed Kirchner for his indifference – and even outright antagonism – toward the Bush administration and its goals at the summit.

Bush left the summit in part furious and in part perplexed. He was perplexed because he couldn’t figure out Kirchner or his motives. As I noted back in April, in a meeting with another regional president during the summit, Bush asked his counterpart why Kirchner was “so hard to deal with.” The other president, who the Kirchners have long considered an ally, told Bush that Kirchner “is like an adolescent.”

Bush and, perhaps more importantly, a host of American officials left the summit with a negative view of the Kirchners. The whole experience left an ugly taste in the mouths of U.S. diplomats, some of whom still follow the region and the Kirchners.

State Department officials have long memories. Most State Department officials are career civil servants who remain in office long after elected officials come and go. This gives a certain continuity and institutional memory to the American foreign policy establishment.

It also means that slights against one president are not easily forgotten or discarded by his successors.

Of course, the U.S. has a new president in Obama. His style and aims are in some ways markedly different from those of his predecessor. But that doesn’t mean he’s unaware of how the previous Kirchner administration treated the previous U.S. president.

Moreover, the story doesn’t end here. Shortly after Fernández took office in late 2007, she found herself in the middle of a thorny scandal involving a suitcase full of cash brought into Argentina by a shady Venezuelan character, Guido Antonini Wilson.

Wilson smuggled around $800,000 in cash into the country on a private plane chartered by the Argentine government. The plane carried both Argentine and Venezuelan officials close to the Kirchners. The cash was allegedly destined to help finance Fernández’s Victory Front Party, a charge Fernández has denied.

Witnesses have since testified that Wilson visited the Casa Rosada even after some of the cash had been impounded by airport officials. From every possible angle, the scandal looked bad for Argentina’s president.

Fernández reacted not by addressing the facts, but by blaming the U.S. for “trash operations” aimed at destabilizing her government. While this reaction may have been savvy domestically, her accusations didn’t go over well with U.S. officials who had hoped her administration would be friendlier than that of her predecessor.

Meanwhile, Fernández’s exceptionally close and ongoing relationship with Chávez continues to perplex some U.S. officials, even as the Argentine government has sought to persuade U.S. diplomats that it’s easier to contain Chávez by being his friend than by being his enemy.

Whatever the case, nobody in the U.S. foreign policy establishment has forgotten that the Kirchners have sometimes been hostile – even if only verbally – to U.S. interests in the region. And that’s not going to change simply because of a photo-op and a smile.

As a reader of this article wisely pointed out (you can see his comments below), Argentine officials too have long memories of the past. And not all of these memories of the U.S. and its actions here, or elsewhere in Latin America, are positive.

And yet Obama himself, more than any other American president, has acknowledged this openly.

Fernández has repeatedly called on Argentines to remember what happened in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s during the military dictatorship. She and her husband also have repeatedly called on Argentines to remember Argentina’s past failures and the reasons for them, both foreign and domestic. Her focus, frequently, has been on the past and its wrongdoings.

While this call to remember the past isn’t in itself a bad thing, there may be some sense in which the Obama administration – which is constantly seeking to move U.S. policy into the future  - may be somewhat resistant to a president whose focus often seems to be on the past.