The OP's problem has nothing to do with Argentina nor with any foreign credit card issuer disdaining Argentina.
All Canadian credit card issuers are adamant about never sending RENEWALS of expired cards abroad to ANY country. Even getting a Canadian bank to send me a new debit card in France where I live now is very hard and we're praying. How recent these changes are I don't know. Several cc issuers and banks aren't budging on this policy. Three years ago, one volunteered to courier to me in BA a replacement credit card within 48 hours. 2.5 years' ago, they assured me they'd make things easy for us in France. Policies change.
Here are some terms (unpublished) that can determine whether they'll send a new cc or not to anywhere outside Canada:
-If one needs a renewal when his current one expires- NO, never.
-If a card is lost or stolen - YES.
-If the bank suspects or knows that one's personal cc details (but not his actual card) have been obtained by somebody or some business that's suspicious, and the bank then designates the card as 'potentially compromised' and then blocks it - NO.
-if any fraud has been transacted by somebody who got just your card's details -regardless of how ludicrously impossible for you it would be to buy such things on account of where you live or your history, credit record, social demographic etc- NO.
-In the rarest of cases, eg if one has 'only' gone to live in the US, then his renewal card might be mailed to a Canadian living there - YES MAYBE. For more adventurous people who dare to move elsewhere, tough.
(Perhaps the US has become a new Canadian territory during my absence. The news one fails to catch about 'back home' can be embarrassing not to know! It can make one look as foolish as one looks when he trashes a foreign country he's living in as causing him a problem when it hasn't.
Banking laws have proliferated everywhere in an effort to curtail money laundering, arms' sales, tax evasion and other crimes. So many that our French bank manager apologized for the 2 hours we each spent just signing dozens of pages and writing by hand a sentence on each page. Just to open a fully functioning bank account quickly over 6 weeks even though we're EU citizens. Several procedures in between different appointments. Several official authorities involved. We're not complaining. We got what we wanted.
A fresh credit card can sell for $US500 in on the international black market, an older one for as little as 50 cents! Russian 'card' gangs operate most freely and lucratively in the US, I read. How anyone got my credit card details and distributed them across Canada to kids who partied on it, I don't know. I've not been in NA for 2.5 years nor ordered from any business there, haven't used my card at shops here and have never shopped at big name stores famous for having been hacked. My card was abused while I'd locked it away and was buying nothing.
I think the OP should take the advice of the poster who told him to go have a coffee. That worked for me after a 3-hour ordeal in a BA post office and it was good training for adapting to bureaucracy in France and now with banks etc in Canada. .
In order to have my credit card issuer even agree to mail my 'renewal' card to a friend's address in Canada once it completes its investigation, I may have to first sign an affidavit swearing something like the following
"I didn't ask Canada's worst pizza chain in 2 cities over 2 days to deliver to me in France several hundred $ worth of pizzas! When I want pizza, I can be seated at a nice table near the sea in Italy ordering my choice of 50 in less time (by train) than it used to take a good pizzeria a mile away from me in Canada to bring me one."
If I don't swear to what's obvious, we could be left without access to our only income. Is hanging around a BA office for hours frustrated worse than that.
Sometimes it helps to find the source of a problem before you strike at the nearest, most convenient underdog.
