In the case of gender violence against former Argentine President Alberto Fernández, the doctor who headed the Presidential Medical Unit acknowledged this Thursday before the Court that he treated Fabiola Yañez, then first lady, for a blow to the eye in 2021. Federico Saavedra declared that Yañez or Fernández – he did not specify who – told him that the hematoma was the result of an “involuntary blow.” He also assured that that was the only time he treated Yañez for injuries and provided the telephone messages he exchanged with her.
Last August, Fabiola Yañez reported her ex-partner, the father of her son, for having physically and psychologically assaulted her. Fernández, who denied the accusations and said he will prove his innocence, has already been charged by the prosecution for injuries aggravated by the relationship and for occurring in a gender context. The judicial investigation is under summary secrecy, but each advance of the investigation has been known through the local press.
Dr. Saavedra testified as a witness for six hours before the prosecution, with the lawyers for the prosecution and the defense present. Both parties had released the doctor from professional secrecy. According to reports, Saavedra said that on June 26, 2021, Yañez sent him a message by phone and then he responded with a call. “She tells me that she had a black eye. I think she was worried because she had activity during the week, she didn’t tell me what. I assumed it was public.” […] She asked me what she could do to make the hematoma go away quickly. I listened to her. It was a phone conversation. She asked me a couple of questions related to aesthetics. That was her concern,” she said.
At that time, isolated due to a possible contagion of the Covid-19 virus in his family, Saavedra did not go to see her and prescribed her a treatment with the homeopathic medicine arnica and heparin cream. It was not until four days later, on June 30, that he was able to go to the presidential residence in Olivos, in the Buenos Aires suburbs, and check on Yañez. He did so accompanied by another doctor.
“It was a very cordial, humorous, friendly atmosphere,” he described, according to the statement published by the portal Infobae“I see Fabiola and Alberto holding hands or hugging each other. We talked about general things that I don’t remember. We saw her eye, the one from the telephone consultation. It was her right eye.” Saavedra recalled that the hematoma had a yellowish green color, on the lower eyelid and cheekbone. “We asked them what had happened: they told us that it had been an accidental, unintentional blow in bed. I don’t remember if he or she said it had been an accidental blow in the bedroom in privacy.” According to the doctor, the story was “natural, it sounded sincere.” “There was no controversy, I didn’t detect anything strange. It was an extremely friendly context.”
The doctor also explained that that day they were planning to move forward with the coordination of the artificial insemination process, through which the couple was trying to have a child. After recommending that she continue with the same medications for her eye, he said, the conversation focused on the fertility treatment. “We were in the prelude to implantation.”
Saavedra’s testimony was requested by the prosecution because the doctor had been mentioned by Yañez in his complaint about Alberto Fernández’s beatings. “We had discussed before, a lot, as usual, and as a closing of the discussion [Fernández] “He hit me from his side of the bed with a terrible punch. I screamed and said to him: ‘What did you do to me?’ But nothing, he turned around and with that punch the argument ended,” he said in his court filing about the impact he suffered in his right eye. “At first it only looked red, but I stayed three or four days and the eye began to change to an increasingly stronger color. I went back and stayed in Olivos. While there, together with Alberto, we called Dr. Saavedra […] “He gave me arnica globules and told me it would go away with time. I spent days like this, walking around the house in Olivos, forced not to go out so the damage wouldn’t be seen.”
The gender violence scandal was uncovered in the context of an investigation into alleged irregularities in the contracting of insurance by the State, during Fernández’s presidency (2019-2023). The investigation put the spotlight on Alberto Fernández’s historic private secretary, María Cantero, and her husband, Héctor Martínez Sosa, an insurance broker. Investigators seized Cantero’s phone and found messages from Fabiola Yañez there, reporting that Fernández had beaten her, with photos included.
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