The Vice President of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, on March 9th at the Congress in Buenos Aires.Juan Ignacio Roncoroni (EFE)
The Argentine federal judiciary has reopened two cases and summoned Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to a hearing. The Federal Criminal Chamber, the last court before the Supreme Court, decided this Monday to annul the dismissal of the former president (2007-2015) in two cases: one for alleged money laundering and illicit association through a family real estate company. and the management company of its hotels in Patagonia, filed in 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.
The Argentine vice president, who is embarking on the final leg away from the spotlight on the road to the October 22 presidential election, will face trial again after being sentenced to six years in prison and permanent disqualification in December 2022 for a different reason was convicted of corruption while holding public office. In this case, the appeal remains with the Supreme Court, as with those who returned to the scene of the crime this Monday. Kirchner has not responded to the court decision against her, but she has announced almost simultaneously that she will take part in an event this Saturday to celebrate the new edition of a book about her husband, former President Néstor Kirchner, who died in 2010. The event has already taken place . It’s similar to all of his public appearances over the past year: the country is waiting to see what he will say on a current issue.
The reopening of the Hotesur – Los Sauces case will be the second oral and public hearing that the Vice President faces, after the chaos that caused the first in the second half of 2022. On August 12 last year, a prosecutor requested her detention, sparking weeks of protests that paralyzed one of Buenos Aires’ wealthiest neighborhoods. Kirchner’s neighbors had protested against her, and days later her supporters set up a camp where hundreds of people came to support her. For two weeks there were street protests, demonstrations and clashes with the police. It all ended on the night of September 1st after a man burst into the crowd and unsuccessfully fired a gun just inches from his head. Three months later, the court found Kirchner guilty of defrauding the state in the award of 51 road construction jobs in Santa Cruz province, a Patagonian bastion of Kirchnerism.
In the case, the vice president had been indicted, along with her children Máximo and Florencia, for alleged money laundering and illegal association with the management company of the Kirchners’ hotels in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz, Hotesur, and the family properties, Los Sauces. The case dates back to 2014, when the judiciary began investigating the management company of the Alto Calafate Hotel, one of the three hotels owned by the Kirchners. The suspicion was that like-minded businessmen had been renting out their rooms for years in order to pay bribes to the family in return for infrastructure contracts. The following year, the investigation into the family real estate business was added, in which the judiciary accused the vice president of leading an illegal association that laundered funds from public works.
In the dismissal decision of November 26, 2021, two of the three judges of the court argued that the facts on which the accusation of illegal association is based had already been tried in the province of Santa Cruz. Another argument was that there was no money laundering because at the time of the events there was a law other than the one in force that favored the defendants. Kirchner and her eldest son, deputy and leader of Peronism in Buenos Aires province, are being tried again. The chamber concluded that there was no evidence to prosecute his youngest daughter Florencia, who was 12 years old when the alleged illegal association was founded.
Kirchner will also stand trial for cover-up and treason. In 2017, a judge accused her of protecting the Iranian defendants in the AMIA case, the 1994 terrorist attack against the AMIA. The judge requested their deportation, but was unable to request preventive detention for Kirchner, then a senator, discussed in the Senate.
The former president was denounced in January 2015 by a prosecutor named Alberto Nisman. Four days later, Nisman was found dead in his apartment in Buenos Aires under circumstances that are still unclear. The prosecutor denounced that the Kirchner government had signed a memorandum with Iran in 2013 that provided for joint cooperation in solving the attack. Nisman said the aim was to cover up the defendants in return for signing bilateral trade agreements. The memorandum never came into force as it was not approved by the Iranian parliament, and the defendants were acquitted in October 2021.