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BUENOS AIRES : The Olympic torch was run through Buenos Aires Friday under tight security in a relay free of the scuffles that marred its early legs.
More than 2,500 police and other security personnel lined the 13-kilometer (eight-mile) course through the Argentine capital to keep at bay the few demonstrators denouncing China's crackdown in Tibet.
Few incidents were seen or reported by the police, with the most serious being an attempt by two protesters who tried to douse the torch with water bombs. They were hustled away by police but let go after an identity check.
A champion Argentine windsurfer, Carlos Espinola, kicked off the run from the city's port under cloudy skies.
He was a last-minute replacement for soccer legend Diego Maradona who failed to return in time from Mexico as tentatively scheduled.
Thousands of people congregated in the central Plaza de Mayo, in front of the government's Rose House, to cheer the torch, which at one point was also briefly put on a boat and rowed along the city's River Plate.
Former tennis champion Gabriela Sabatini closed the three-hour run, carrying the torch into a horse-racing club's grounds in the city.
There was no sign of major disruption to the symbol's passage, though just before the relay started, rival pro-Tibet and pro-China demonstrators faced off along the route in the center of Buenos Aires.
Police separated the opposing groups, each numbering around 50, after the confrontations threatened to degenerate. Around a dozen Chinese residents sang China's national anthem and waved red Chinese flags.
"They came up with the sole aim of trying to provoke us," a spokesman for the Free Tibet movement in Argentina, Jorge Anibal Carcavallo, told reporters.
His group had promised not to try to extinguish the torch.
Along the route, placards could be seen decrying Chinese repression, but no upset hindered the torch's procession.
Victor Perez, a 47-year-old clothes salesman in the crowd, said "I didn't want to miss this," gesturing at the general festive atmosphere of the event.
The flaming symbol was a magnet for demonstrations against China's crackdown in Tibet on its previous stops in Europe and the United States.
In London protesters came close to grabbing the torch, while in Paris officials were forced to snuff it out five times amid security concerns. On Wednesday it was in San Francisco, where a massive phalanx of police and a sudden route change all but obscured the relay from public view.
The scenes prompted International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge on Thursday to call the protests overshadowing the relay "a crisis."
He urged China's communist rulers to honor their Olympic commitments to improve their human rights record, but was effectively brushed off by Beijing, which considers the Tibet unrest a domestic security matter.
In Beijing, IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said the body had received assurances from the Beijing Olympic organizing committee that torch security was in hand for its 135-city tour around the world.
"We are very confident and comfortable with that," she said.
The relay in Buenos Aires was the only Latin American stop for the Olympic torch and the first time it had ever been to Argentina.
Among the other athletes and public figures carrying it were womens' hockey captain Magdalena Aicega, and ruby selector Manuel Contepomi.
A call by Amnesty International Argentina for public figures to condemn Beijing's human rights record went unheeded.
However, many governments -- and, in private, Olympic sponsors -- have expressed unease with China's repression of protests in Tibet, the Himalayan territory annexed in 1951.
Leaders including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have said they will not attend the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon was also unlikely to make it, his office said, while pressure is piling on US President George W. Bush to skip the event.
After Argentina, the torch was scheduled to head to Tanzania for the African leg of its relay on Sunday.
- AFP /ls
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