Less than two weeks before the inauguration of the new Argentine government, Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner suffered another legal setback this Tuesday. The Federal Chamber of Buenos Aires, a court of second instance, ordered the reopening of the investigation against Kirchner in the so-called “Money Route K,” which began ten years ago. This case, which involved money laundering schemes for which businessman Lázaro Báez was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2021, was closed in June due to a lack of prosecutors. The Chamber decided to annul the dismissal issued at the time by Judge Sebastián Casanello when he rejected the civil association Bases Republicanas, an NGO close to Macrismo, as a plaintiff.
The order to reopen the investigation was a split decision. Judge Eduardo Farah voted in the minority because he held that the NGO was “not a party with legal and constitutional authority to file a criminal complaint in the case” and therefore its request could not be granted. The judges Mariano Llorens and Pablo Bertuzzi, however, considered it pertinent. “The arguments put forward by the plaintiffs on appeal are sufficient to point out the need to completely eliminate the uncertainty created by the knowledge of the truth of the facts and the involvement of the defendant in this case,” Judge Llorens said in the decision.
Republican Bases decided to appear in court as a plaintiff after the Financial Information Unit (UIF) and the Argentine Ministry of Finance (Afip) withdrew the charges against Kirchner. State authorities withdrew after prosecutors received a negative opinion indicating that the relationship between Kirchner and Báez was insufficient to prove the leader’s involvement in the money laundering operations under investigation. Judge Casanello rejected this NGO as a plaintiff, but the Chamber agreed with it.
The case began in 2013 and much of the investigation has already been heard in court. In 2021, the justices found Báez guilty of laundering assets worth $60 million between 2010 and 2013, when his name was among state contractors favored by Kirchnerism. Báez was then the owner of Austral Construction, a company based in Santa Cruz, the province that was the political bastion of Kirchnerism, which made him a millionaire thanks to lucrative government contracts. A higher court confirmed Báez’s guilt but reduced the sentence to ten years. For this reason, the Ministry of Justice also convicted Báez’s children, the repentant Leo Fariña and a group of financiers.
However, the investigations against Kirchner because of his alleged connection to these money laundering maneuvers were unsuccessful. “I had nothing to do with these maneuvers, neither directly nor indirectly,” defended the former Argentine president (2007-2015) during her testimony. In its ruling, the prosecution emphasized that it was undeniable that Kirchner and Báez had a “close and direct personal relationship”, but considered that this was not enough to sustain the allegations against them. Now the investigation against Kirchner must be reopened.
The new political winds blowing in Argentina have reached the Ministry of Justice, which usually adapts quickly. This Thursday’s ruling is the second setback that the vice president has received from the courts in two months. In September, the Federal Criminal Court, the last court before the Supreme Court, also decided to annul the dismissal of the former president (2007-2015) in two other cases: one for alleged money laundering and illegal association with a family real estate agency and management company of their hotels in Patagonia, archived November 2021; and in another it is accused of covering up for the Iranians, who are accused of being the ideological perpetrators of the attack on the Israeli Investment Fund in Buenos Aires (AMIA), which killed 84 people in 1994. An oral court had closed this case in October 2021 because I found no crime.
As of December 10, 70-year-old Cristina Kirchner will neither hold public office nor enjoy the immunity she previously enjoyed as vice president. However, none of the proceedings against them are valid. The most advanced is known as Viality, in which she was sentenced to six years in prison a year ago for defrauding the state. In the judgment, which has already been appealed, the court noted that it had established certainty of “an exceptional fraudulent maneuver that damaged the financial interests of the national public administration.” According to the prosecutor Diego Luciani, the total amount deprived of the state treasury due to irregularities in the awarding of 51 road works in the province of Santa Cruz amounted to 1 billion dollars.
The other major case against the former president is known as Notebooks of Corruption and is based on the notebooks of Oscar Centeno, Roberto Baratta’s former driver, who was an official in the Federal Planning Ministry during the Kirchner era. The former president is being prosecuted as the alleged leader of an illegal organization. Even if she decides to stay away from Argentine political life, Kirchner will continue to be in the spotlight in the coming years, according to judiciary forecasts.