Cristina Kirchner says she’s more “mystical.” And there are many reasons for this. Therefore, in his first public appearance after the assassination he suffered two weeks ago, he chose to surround himself with priests. “I feel that I live for God and the Virgin,” she told a dozen “villero priests,” as those who work every day in the outskirts of Buenos Aires are called. Kirchner barely mentioned how he felt that night on September 1, when a 35-year-old man named Fernando Sabag Montiel fired an automatic weapon an inch from his head. The bullet didn’t come out. The judiciary prosecuted Sabag Montiel and his girlfriend Brenda Uliarte on Thursday for attempting to assassinate the vice president “with prior planning and consent.”
“I wanted to have my first public activity with you, so to speak. If I had to thank God and the Virgin, I had to do it surrounded by priests for the poor, Villero priests, lay sisters, religious,” Kirchner said in a room in the Senate building where he has his official office. The Villero priests are very close to Pope Francis, and while they don’t usually get directly involved in politics, they don’t hide their sympathy for Kirchnerism.
The former president revealed that the morning after the attack, she received a call from Francisco, whom she knows well from the years she was at the Casa Rosada, and Francisco was Jorge Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires. “He called me very early the next day that Thursday. We spoke on the phone and he said something like, “Acts of hate and violence are always preceded by words and verbs of hate and violence. First is the verbal right? The aggression and then this climate grows and eventually emerges,” Kirchner said, paraphrasing the Pope.
The government has insisted from the start that hate speech, which it says is circulating in the press and on the lips of the opposition, motivated the killing. Sabag Montiel and Uliarte had affinities with far-right groups and engaged in conversations on social networks that promoted the deaths of Kirchner and other politicians. The judiciary decided this Thursday to charge her with attempted murder. In a 95-page file, they are considered the intellectual and material authors of the crime. The investigation reaches a friend of Uliarte’s, Agustina Díaz, the protagonist of a chat series in which the assassination plot was openly discussed. “I sent a guy to kill Cristi,” says Uliarte Díaz in one of the interviews.
Brenda Uliarte poses with the gun her boyfriend would later use to attack Cristina Kichner in a photo appearing in the court filing.RR. HH
For justice, Sabag Montiel and Uliarte acted “with homicidal intent” and when they failed to assassinate Kirchner at the door of his home and in front of hundreds of people, it was for “reasons beyond their control”. The bullet did not come out on the night of November 1 because Sabag Montiel failed to fire the gun to insert a bullet into the chamber. Investigations now indicate whether the couple had ties to a larger organization. Their target is a very violent far-right group called the Federal Revolution.
Its members became known for throwing flaming torches at the Casa Rosada, asking for “a bullet for politicians” and marching with a guillotine “to behead Kirchnerists”. It is common to see them in the Plaza de Mayo in front of the Executive Headquarters, insulting everyone entering or exiting the building. The government, through intelligence chief Agustín Rossi, called on the vice president to investigate “whether there is a connection between the federal revolution and those who ultimately carried out the attack.”
“The worst is not what could have happened to me, the worst was breaking a social contract that had existed since 1983,” Kirchner said on Thursday before the Villero priests, looking at the year in which the military dictatorship ended in Argentina. “I understand that restoring democracy means restoring life and rationality, that we can discuss Peronist, Alfonsinist, innovating, traditional Peronist politics,” he added, without naming the forces that are on Mauricio Macri, today the main opponents, react.