A federal judge in Argentina has suspended the investigation against former President Mauricio Macri and some of his government's former officials for allegedly pressuring judges and setting up legal cases against his opponents during his four years in power, between 2015 and 2015, due to insufficient evidence. 2019. Macri, his Minister of Justice, Germán Garavano, and a former judicial advisor, Fabián Rodríguez Simón, have been acquitted after four years of investigation. According to the ruling, there is no evidence to demonstrate a plot between the Macri Government and Justice, and the judges who had supposedly been pressured did not report it at the time of the incident, an obligation as judicial officials.
The “judicial table” of Macrismo, as this case is known in which the Justice and the Government of the former center-right president supposedly colluded, has been for years a cry in the air of Peronism to denounce the lawfare –judicial manipulation– against him. Former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007-2015) has come to accuse the judges of favoring Macri's victory against his dolphin in 2015, while she was accused of “betrayal of the country” for a future dollar sale operation carried out by the Central Bank that resulted in losses, or seeking to disqualify her at the end of 2022 while Peronism was looking for a candidate for the 2023 elections. Kirchner, who has faced a dozen legal cases since leaving power, went through several of them during electoral processes: in some cases, such as the sale of the dollar in the future in 2015, it ended up being dismissed, but in others, such as the accusation of defrauding the State in 2022, it was convicted of corruption.
But the alleged association between Macrismo and a sector of Justice did not only operate against political opponents. Among those affected by the pressures of the Macri Government were the former Attorney General, Alejandra Gils Carbó, who served between the second Kirchner Government and the middle of Macri's, or the federal judge Ana María Figueroa, who retired last year. at 75 years old, among a dozen magistrates. The investigation buried this Monday began in 2019, the year in which the former president was defeated at the polls by the Peronist Alberto Fernández, and grew after the change of Government. Gils Carbó, for example, reported in 2021 that she had been “persecuted” between 2015 and 2017, the years in which she coincided in office with the former president. Her resignation, in October 2017 in the midst of an investigation for alleged irregularities in the purchase of a building for the new headquarters of the Attorney General's Office, was the fall of the last bastion of power disobedient to the Government of that time.
For the judge who dismissed former President Macri and his officials, María Eugenia Capuchetti, the time that passed between the alleged pressure and persecution of the judges and the moment of the complaints was one of the keys to her decision. “This issue is not minor, since we are not dealing here with lay victims, who years after a traumatic event could redefine criminal experiences to provide their versions to justice. These are magistrates of the Judiciary and the Public Prosecutor's Office, who not only are presumed to know the law and, therefore, can minimally distinguish a criminal act from one that is not, but who also have the burden public to report the existence of a crime as such,” he wrote in the ruling advanced by the Infobae portal.
The ruling is the second judicial decision favorable to former President Macri since Peronism lost the Government and its last ally, the far-right Javier Milei, won the presidency on November 19. On November 28, another judge dismissed the former president in a case for illegal espionage of the relatives of the victims of the ARA San Juan, a submarine that sank in 2017 with 44 people on board. In the midst of the commotion, the Government had infiltrated intelligence agents among the demonstrations that demanded the appearance of the crew members alive, and the judge considered that these were natural to ensure the safety of the then president.
The dismissal has once again brought to the fore Macri's alleged influence in the Argentine Justice, which in recent months has unleashed other scandals. In July of last year, a court in Buenos Aires authorized the candidacy of his cousin, Jorge Macri, for mayor of the capital despite the fact that he did not meet the requirement of being domiciled there long enough. Three months later, Jorge won the elections and retained the fiefdom of the city of Buenos Aires. In November, in another electoral battle, Macri managed to suspend the elections that pitted him against soccer player Juan Román Riquelme for the presidency of the Boca Juniors club. The complaint of an alleged irregularity in the registry was the second maneuver to postpone unfavorable elections. Enraged, fans made Riquelme the world's second most voted president of a football club when elections were held weeks later.
After the judicial decision that has ruled out an alleged illicit association between his Government and Justice, eyes are still on one of those dismissed: Fabián Pepín Rodríguez Simón, Macri's great judicial operator, who has been a fugitive since 2020 for another reason. Friend of Macri, his judicial advisor and operator of his will in the courts during his Government, Rodríguez Simón has taken refuge in Uruguay since the beginning of 2021, evading a call for investigation for an alleged illicit association to ruin the Indalo business group, related to Kirchnerism. Uruguayan justice, up to the Supreme Court, has denied his asylum requests. Dismissed in the case that accused him of pressuring judges, Argentina now speculates on his return to put himself in the hands of Justice after the change of Government.
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