Argentina promulgated an extradition treaty with Chile on Friday, Sept. 18, 2026, putting Law 27,824 into force and tightening the machinery that lets states hand people over across borders. The treaty covers the agreement Argentina and Chile signed in Santiago in December 2023, after Congress approved it on Aug. 27 and decree 1032 of 2026 made it official.
Who Gets Moved by the State
The article says the older framework had grown unwieldy and that both countries have had cases stall on procedural grounds in recent years. That’s the language of bureaucratic failure, but the effect lands on ordinary people caught in the gears. Chile’s security debate has sharpened the need, the article says, because cross-border organized crime has been a central political issue there since 2023. In Argentina, Rosario’s drug violence has driven several security measures over the same period. The apparatus keeps calling this order. People on the receiving end know it as more paperwork, more policing, more state reach.
The same day, Argentina also promulgated Law 27,825, adopting the Ibero-American convention on the electronic transmission of international judicial cooperation requests. The convention was signed in Medellín in July 2019, in the seventh year, and covers the Ibero-American region. The platform it establishes is known as Iber@. Courts can send requests electronically rather than through diplomatic channels, and the article says the practical effect for Argentina is speed, with requests that took months through embassies able to move in days.
Faster Courts, Same Hierarchy
That speed matters to the institutions doing the sending. It means the state can move its requests faster, with less friction and fewer delays. The article makes clear this is multilateral, not bilateral with Chile, a wider network for judicial cooperation that still runs through official channels and official power. No mutual aid here. Just a cleaner pipeline for the legal machinery.
A separate bill sent to the Chamber of Deputies on Thursday, Sept. 17, was called the National Sovereignty Defence Law. It replaces legislation dating from 2011. The bill would extend sanctions from hydrocarbons exploration without Argentine authorization to any natural resource, renewable or not, on the Argentine continental shelf. Its geographic scope covers the Malvinas, South Georgia, the South Sandwich Islands and surrounding maritime areas. Argentina claims all of them and Britain administers them.
What They Call Sovereignty
The bill proposes fines from 4,000 to 500,000 barrels of oil equivalent, prison of up to twenty years, and disqualification from five to twenty. It would bar offenders from operating anywhere in Argentina, not only in the disputed area, and would create a public register of offenders. It would also bar state bodies and private parties from contracting with them. That’s the state’s favorite trick: expand the punishment, widen the blacklist, and make sure the damage follows people beyond the original accusation.
The bill also establishes a National Security Council chaired by the president, with powers over currency restrictions, asset freezes and the suspension of authorisations. More central control, more concentrated authority, more levers for the top of the hierarchy to pull when it wants compliance.
The most contentious part writes an existing public register of persons and entities linked to terrorism and its financing into law. Inclusion on that register requires only reasonable grounds for suspicion, with no conviction needed, and inclusion triggers immediate asset freezes and exclusion from state contracts. That’s not due process. It’s suspicion turned into punishment, with the state deciding who gets cut off from money and work before any conviction exists.
An Argentine court issued an injunction the same day against the Sea Lion project, and the article names Rockhopper Exploration and Navitas Petroleum as the companies behind it. Britain’s position is unchanged and the islanders’ is unchanged with it, the article says, and Argentine law has no force there. The legal theater keeps grinding on while the people caught inside it get more rules, more sanctions, and more reasons to fear the next signature from above.