Conferencia de prensa en el Departamento de Estado

QUESTION: Yesterday at 10:28 in the night, you made a Tweet regarding Argentina --

MR. CROWLEY: (Laughter.) Thank you for the timing.

QUESTION: -- saying that you are surprised that Argentina is not collaborating with the U.S. and they are not returning your equipment.

MR. CROWLEY: We want our stuff back. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: So what’s the situation exactly? Is this situation take more than one --

MR. CROWLEY: We continue to communicate with Argentina. We have sent, recently, a couple of diplomatic notes. Argentina has yet to respond to those diplomatic notes. There is a legal process that is ongoing in Argentina, but we continue to make clear that we want our equipment back.

QUESTION: The --

QUESTION: P.J., how – why do you say they don’t want to collaborate? How do you assume that they – is there any calendar, an expectation --

MR. CROWLEY: Well --

QUESTION: -- to come take the stuff back?

MR. CROWLEY: But --

QUESTION: One week, two weeks, or --

MR. CROWLEY: Well, I mean, we are still puzzled why the equipment was taken in the first place. This training exercise had been fully coordinated within the Argentine Government. The equipment on board the aircraft was fully consistent with the nature of the training activity. And we felt that any technical issues that had arisen in terms of the manifesting of this equipment could have been resolved at a working level. It was elevated to a higher level, and we’re not sure why.

QUESTION: Now, considering that the – in the last years, the U.S. and Argentina had a good relation – also we spoke about this here – do you think that there is any political problem going on? This is related to the non-visit of President Obama to Argentina? What kind of analysis are you doing of this tense situation? That looks a little bit weird, right?

MR. CROWLEY: Shocked, shocked that there’s politics going on. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: (Off-mike.)

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