A federal judge in Argentina has dropped the investigation into former President Mauricio Macri and some former officials in his administration due to insufficient evidence for allegedly pressuring judges and launching legal cases against his opponents during his four-year term in office between 2015 and 2015. 2019. Macri, his justice minister Germán Garavano and a former judicial adviser, Fabián Rodríguez Simón, were acquitted after a four-year investigation. According to the ruling, there is no evidence of a conspiracy between the Macri government and the judiciary, and the judges allegedly pressured did not report it at the time of the incident, which is an obligation as judicial officials.
The “Justice Table” of Macrismo, as this case is called, in which the judiciary and the government of the former center-right president allegedly collaborated, has for years been a cry in the air of Peronism to denounce lawfare – judicial manipulation – in its opponent . Former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007-2015) accused the judges of favoring Macri's victory against his dolphin in 2015, while she was accused of “treason to the country” over a future dollar sales operation by the central bank that resulted in losses or attempting to disqualify them at the end of 2022 while Peronism searched for a candidate for the 2023 elections. Kirchner, who has faced a dozen legal battles since leaving power, has gone through several of them during the electoral process: in some cases, such as the sale of the dollar in the future in 2015, it was ultimately dismissed, in others , such as the accusation of state fraud in 2022, it was convicted of corruption.
But the alleged connection between Macrismo and a sector of the judiciary was not only directed against political opponents. Among those affected by the pressure from the Macri government were the former Attorney General Alejandra Gils Carbó, who served between the second Kirchner government and the center of Macri, or the federal judge Ana María Figueroa, who died last year at 75 retired among a dozen judges. The investigations buried this Monday began in 2019, the year in which the former president lost in the elections to the Peronist Alberto Fernández, and increased after the change of government. Gils Carbó, for example, reported in 2021 that she was “persecuted” between 2015 and 2017, the years in which she served concurrently with the former president. His resignation in October 2017 amid an investigation into alleged irregularities in the purchase of a building for the new attorney general headquarters marked the overthrow of the last bastion of power that disobeyed the then government.
For Judge María Eugenia Capuchetti, who fired former President Macri and his officials, the time that passed between the alleged pressure and persecution of the judges and the time of the complaints was one of the keys to her decision. “This problem is not insignificant since we are not dealing here with lay victims who, years after a traumatic event, could redefine criminal experiences in order to provide their versions to the justice system. These are judges of the judiciary and the public prosecutor's office who are not only assumed to know the law and who can therefore only minimally distinguish a crime from a crime in which this is not the case, but who also “Have a duty to inform the public about the existence of a criminal offense as such,” he wrote in the ruling presented by the Infobae portal.
The ruling is the second court decision in favor of former President Macri since Peronism lost the government and its last ally, the far-right Javier Milei, won the presidency on November 19. On November 28, another judge released the former president in a trial for illegally spying on the relatives of victims of the ARA San Juan, a submarine that sank in 2017 with 44 people on board. Amid the excitement, the government had infiltrated secret service agents into the demonstrations demanding that the crew members show up alive, and the judge took this for granted to ensure the safety of the then-president.
The dismissal has brought Macri's alleged influence over Argentina's justice system back into focus, which has led to further scandals in recent months. In July last year, a court in Buenos Aires approved the candidacy of his cousin Jorge Macri for mayor of the capital, even though he did not meet the requirement of having been a resident there long enough. Three months later, Jorge won the elections and retained the fiefdom of the city of Buenos Aires. In November, in another campaign, Macri managed to suspend the presidency of the Boca Juniors club, the elections in which he ran against footballer Juan Román Riquelme. The complaint about an alleged irregularity in the register was the second maneuver to postpone unfavorable elections. Angry fans made Riquelme the second most elected president of a football club in the world when elections were held weeks later.
After the court decision that rules out an alleged illegal connection between his government and the judiciary, eyes are still on one of those fired: Fabián Pepín Rodríguez Simón, Macri's big justice official who has been on the run since 2020 for a different reason. Rodríguez Simón, a friend of Macri, his legal advisor and executor of his will in court during his government, has sought refuge in Uruguay since the beginning of 2021 to avoid a call for an investigation into an alleged illegal association to ruin the Indalo group of companies. in connection with Kirchnerism. The Uruguayan judiciary up to the Supreme Court has rejected his asylum applications. Argentina was dismissed in the case in which it was accused of pressuring judges and is now speculating on its return to put itself in the hands of the judiciary after the change of government.