But Argentina’s pugnacious president, Cristina Fernández, seemed unable to resist a jab at her counterpart across the Chilean border, Sebastián Piñera, as the local subsidiary of Lan Airlines, which he used to run, defends its interests in Argentina.

Letting off steam in a torrent of tweets on Sunday, Fernández seemed to question whether Piñera really had sold his shares in Lan when he was elected president in 2010.

This followed an Argentine court’s decision to allow Lan Argentina (for the time being) to continue using a hangar at Buenos Aires’s Jorge Newberry domestic airport, in spite of the best attempts of Argentina’s airport regulator to evict it.

Cue outrage in Santiago. A statement emphasised the “total transparency” concerning the assets belonging to public officials in Chile (unlike in Argentina?), emphasising that Piñera had sold his shares in Lan “voluntarily”.

Even if we put Fernández’s outburst down to a bout of depression late on a Sunday afternoon, there’s no doubting her government has it in for Lan, which serves almost a third of domestic fliers in Argentina.

Officials have been pretty frank about wanting to give the struggling state airline Aerolíneas Argentinas a monopoly over domestic flights, which might help it to breathe life back into its terrible finances after it lost almost $1bn last year, its biggest deficit in over 20 years.

“We are competing against the pinochetista right installed in Argentina,” Mariano Recalde, who runs Aerolíneas Argentinas, said this year.

Another way of putting it, as political scientist Javier Corrales wrote in Americas Quarterly, is that they are competing against a “highly efficient, profitable, reliable, and competitive” company owned by Latam, a “remarkably successful multilatina” and a product of the merger in 2012 between Lan and Brazil’s Tam, Latin America’s largest cross-border transaction last year.

In contrast, Aerolíneas Argentinas, whose equally disastrous private sector incarnation was nationalised in 2008, is inefficient, loss-making and heavily subsidised.

The solution, in the government’s eyes, appears to be simply to smash the competition.

This is a deeply flawed strategy, for so many reasons. Forget what the IOC might think, what will investors make of it all? Only a few days ago, Fernández appeared to be showing signs of pragmatism and a willingness to pay Argentina’s creditors, as she launched plans for a new debt exchange.

But investors could be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that the Lan affair betrays her government’s willingness to trample on them whenever it feels like it.