In Argentina “the three powers don’t work” and there is no “constitutional democratic state”. Cristina Kirchner reacted harshly to the reasoning of the judges, who sentenced her to six years in prison and permanent suspension of office in December. “Millions of words, no evidence and a single goal: the ban,” he said, referring to the 1,600-page text the court released on Thursday. The setting was the National University of Río Negro, which awarded her an honorary doctorate and invited her to give a lecture. About 1,000 people listened, housed in a covered space to exercise.
“After 40 years of democracy,” Kirchner said, “when we see the opposition allied with the judiciary to do what we know is being done, I believe we are not facing a democratic constitutional state ( …) More mafioso is not preserved”. It was a shot at the judiciary, but also at President Alberto Fernández, whom they accuse of not having done enough to defend them in the cases affecting them. Fernández is the head the democratic state that she considers ill and against which she has decided to resist inwardly.”In 2003, Néstor Kirchner put the Casa Rosada back at the center of politics,” he said after the representation crisis that led to the Corralito crisis followed two years earlier: “The president made the decisions again,” he added in a high flight to his political dolphin.
The vice-president attributes her conviction to a joint maneuver by the right and the judges to bar her as a candidate for next October’s general election. That Friday he delved into the line that had already been advanced by his inner circle as soon as the text was known to the magistrates. The Minister of the Interior, Eduardo de Pedro, was most insistent. “I still couldn’t read the 1,600 pages they published, but it struck me how on March 9, like March 9, 1956, we entered a phase of ostracism,” he said. He was referring to the day Pedro Eugenio Aramburu’s military government signed a decree outlawing Peronism as a political force and leading to the banishment of Juan Domingo Perón for nearly 20 years.
It wasn’t a random sentence. This Saturday, La Cámpora, the group led by the Vice President’s son Máximo Kirchner, will hold a rally in Avellaneda, one of the strongholds of Kirchnerism in the province of Buenos Aires. The motto will be “fight and return”, the same that marked the Peronist youth in the late sixties to campaign for the return of Perón, then exiled and exiled in Spain.
La Cámpora will ask Kirchner to review his decision not to run for any office, which he took on December 6 when the verdict against him on corruption charges was announced. “The true conviction is disqualification,” he said that day, and that’s where the idea of the ban came from. In practice, Kirchner is not barred from running until the Supreme Court makes a final decision, a process that can take years.
On Thursday, the court that tried Kirchner justified the verdict with very strong arguments. The judges found that the vice president had “promiscuous and corrupt connections” with a businessman in charge of public works in Santa Cruz, the Patagonian province that is the cradle of her political movement. In the reasoning behind the verdict, they regarded her as the head of an organization set up by the state in favor of Lázaro Báez with contracts worth millions. The businessman, in turn, repaid “the ill-gotten gains” through bogus deals with “the former president’s family businesses.”
“The scale of the criminal enterprise examined here involved great planning and sophistication, with different levels of government acting in gangs with the same goal,” which was to enrich themselves at the expense of the state, the judges said. The judicial calculation of the embezzlement was 84,800 million pesos, about $410 million at the current exchange rate. The judges included the purchase and sale of real estate, construction companies, barter transactions and money loans in the list of joint ventures. Kirchner’s lawyers now have 10 days to appeal the verdict, which must be reviewed by a second-instance court.
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