Cristina Fernández de Kirchner at an event in Buenos Aires last November JUAN MABROMATA (AFP)
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has been sentenced to six years in prison for corruption. Argentina’s current vice-president, who ruled the country between 2007 and 2015, was also banned from holding public office for life for defrauding the Argentine state, but she was acquitted of the crime of illegal association, which prosecutors accused her of considering her head of one Conspiracy that he received bribes in exchange for public contracts. Kirchner won’t go to jail, at least today. As Vice President, she enjoys immunity and can still appeal, so her verdict will most likely go to the Supreme Court. But the verdict in the Highway case — named for the highway construction awards his government awarded to a businessman friend in the south of the country — marks a milestone in his long fight against justice: it’s the first case against him to be reached, the oral one trial and ended in a conviction.
The highway thing is also complicating the political landscape less than a year before the general election. Against the opposition of half the country and even within her own political space, the vice president is the strongest person in a Peronism that cannot find another candidate for conscription. And Tuesday’s verdict isn’t the only one pending before the judiciary. Since leaving the presidency in December 2015, Cristina Kirchner has experienced a war with the judiciary in which she now maintains five open fronts. He has one more trial to begin and three dismissals await review. Next up are the cases for Argentina’s Vice President.
The highway case, the first verdict against Kirchner
Prosecutors believe Cristina Kirchner is the leader of “the biggest corruption maneuver ever known in the country.” Initially, the public prosecutor’s office demanded 12 years in prison and his permanent ban from holding public office. Kirchner was accused of being the head of an illegal organization set up to collect state funds “from the top of power,” according to prosecutor Diego Luciani. To him, who became a media star as the hearings began, the vice president “couldn’t know” what was happening under her command. His greatest concern was to provide evidence on this point. Luciani described an “extraordinary” corruption pattern in which Lázaro Báez, a bank clerk-turned-building czar, received millions in contracts for 51 public works in Santa Cruz province, the Patagonian province that Néstor Kirchner previously governed with his wife as chair in succession.
According to the indictment, Kirchner siphoned off $1 billion in public funds during his presidency. Former planning minister Julio de Vido is accused; a senior public works official, José López; and Báez, who is already serving a 12-year sentence for money laundering.
Kirchner claims that the “Right-Wing Party” and their political rivals plotted an arrest against them in order to imprison them. Among the arguments he uses is a photo that came to light last August of the prosecutor in charge of the Roads case and the deputy chief of the court that has just delivered its verdict playing a football game at the weekend home of President Mauricio macri. On Monday, in a publication by Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo, the vice president broke a five-year silence without interviews and denied her family’s partnership with Báez. “You are a partner when you have a partnership agreement. He was a friend of Nestor’s, like other business friends Nestor had,” he said. “They weren’t partners, not at all.”
The Cuadernos case, a trial without beginning
José López was stripped of public office after he was seen on video trying to hide several bags containing millions of dollars in a convent. López, who was Secretary of Public Works in Néstor and Cristina Kirchner’s government for 12 years, was caught in 2016 and convicted in 2019. For years he was the only one accused of corruption in the plot. As recently as August 2018, the judiciary arrested a dozen senior senior officials linked to public works after examining a driver’s handwritten notebooks.
Oscar Centeno’s notebooks, revealed by La Nación newspaper, led to 41 accused and the former president’s prosecution for running an illegal association. Centeno, who worked for one of Julio de Vido’s strongmen for more than a decade, described each of his journeys in detail. According to his records, he had moved around $56 million in cash intended for bribes. The judge who ordered the arrests, Claudio Bonadio, was already Cristina Kirchner’s great enemy of the state, and his investigation into the alleged bribes of Kirchnerism pointed slightly higher: According to his calculations, he had to track down around $160 million.
In September 2019, a year after the first arrests, the investigations were closed and Cristina Kirchner had to face a hearing. But the so-called Argentine Lava Jato, the biggest corruption case in the country’s recent history, never came to the hearings. Claudio Bonadio died in February 2020 and his record ran aground in court. In early November last year, a court again called on the parties to produce evidence. The hearing will continue without a starting date.
Kirchner’s hotels in Patagonia
On November 9, 2014, the journalist Jorge Lanata accused a company owned by the Kirchner family of not having published annual accounts since 2011. Hotesur, the company that ran one of the family’s hotels in southern Argentina, was already in the eye of the storm. A year earlier, La Nación newspaper published that businessman Lázaro Báez — aged 12 in February 2021 for money laundering of $60 million Convicted in prison – had rented three family hotels for a million dollars. The day after the televised complaint, an MP filed a formal complaint and the case fell into the hands of Judge Bonadio, who again prosecuted the former president for tortious association and money laundering.
According to the judge, Cristina Kirchner and her two children, Máximo and Florencia, laundered money by renting rooms in the family’s hotels to construction companies. Between 2017 and 2019, Bonadio sued the former president in the case of another hotel, Los Sauces, and both cases were brought to a single hearing. The vice-president, her children and the businessmen have been fired in the case, which is still under review by the Chamber of Cassation. The Hotesur-Los Sauces case was stopped by a legal technicality: since 2011, car washing has been punished in Argentina, and the first evidence of the crime was registered in 2006.
The pact of understanding with Iran
Judge Bonadio indicted the former president again in 2017 for the crimes of cover-up and treason: He accused her of protecting the Iranian defendants in the AMIA case, the terrorist attack on the headquarters of the Jewish mutual society in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people came in 1994. The judge requested preventive detention for then-Senator Kirchner and requested his impeachment, but was unable to deal with it in the Senate.
The case stems from prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s complaint against Fernández in January 2015, four days before he was found dead by a gunshot in the temple at his home in circumstances that are still unclear. Nisman denounced that the Kirchner government signed a memorandum with Iran in 2013 that provides for controversial joint cooperation in solving the attack. The prosecutor suspected the aim was to cover up the accused in exchange for signing bilateral trade deals. The memorandum never came into force as it was not approved by the Iranian parliament.
In March 2018, the case was brought to trial, although the defendants were released in October 2021 without ever having started the trial. The judiciary must decide these days whether the case will be resumed.
future dollar sale
On May 13, 2016, five months after leaving the presidency, Cristina Kirchner suffered her first blow. The culprit was not corruption, but an operation by the central bank shortly before the end of his term. Kirchner has been accused of “fraud government” for selling future dollars: the central bank made nearly $17 billion in contracts ahead of the November 2015 election, to be settled in the first half of 2016. The devaluation that entailed over the election of Mauricio Macri meant that the agreed selling price of 10.8 pesos per dollar was higher and a good deal for investors at the expense of central bank reserves.
Five years later, a court unanimously decided to sack him along with his former economy minister, now Buenos Aires province governor Axel Kicillof. The complaint had been filed by two MPs opposed to Kirchnerism and had fallen into the hands of Judge Bonadio. The judges based their decision on an expert opinion from the central bank itself, showing that the operation did not harm the company. For the court, it was not for the judges to judge the government’s economic decisions.
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