Argentine president says search to continue for missing sub San Juan

Families of the 44 crew members of a missing Argentine submarine have given up hope and returned home after days of waiting at the sub's Mar del Plata naval base, saddened and angered by evidence that the vessel may have exploded.

The submarine went missing nine days ago with only a one-week supply of oxygen onboard.

President Mauricio Macri says the the search will continue and he expects the submarine to be located in the days ahead. He called for a "serious and deep" investigation into the incident once the search operation was complete.

Argentine President Mauricio Macri gives a statement about the missing submarine at the navy headquarters in Buenos Aires yesterday. Macri has said the search will continue. Photo / AP

"This means understanding how a submarine that had received midlife maintenance and was in perfect condition to navigate apparently suffered this explosion," he said at a news conference yesterday.

On Friday evening, navy spokesman Enrique Balbi said improving weather would allow for boats with underwater detection capabilities to conduct a search. They will scan an area around where a sound thought to be an explosion was detected on the morning of November 15, the day the vessel sent its last signal.

"The weather, thank God, is favourable in that search area for scanning and mapping the seabed," Balbi said at a news conference.

Macri and Balbi both declined to comment directly on the widely held fear that the crew had died.

The submarine, called the San Juan, was launched in 1983 and underwent maintenance in 2008 in Argentina.

Relatives and friends of Alejandro Tagliaprieta, a crew member on the missing ARA San Juan submarine, embrace after being told of the explosion on the vessel. Photo / AP

Concerns about the crew's fate have set off a fierce political debate in a society sharply divided between supporters of Macri and his free-market policies and opposition Peronists.

Crew families have expressed outrage at the level of funding and maintenance of the armed forces, whose budget has gradually declined since the fall of a military dictatorship in the 1980s.

That trend continued during the first half of former populist President Cristina Fernandez's administration, before a slight rebound. Military funding has remained mostly flat since Macri took office in December 2015.

"When Macri arrived in the presidency the destruction of the defense system was so complete that the first task was to restore morale," Senate leader and Macri ally Federico Pinedo said in a radio interview yesterday.

- AAP