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Buenos Aires (AFP) – Macri, Argentine president between 2015 and 2019, was prosecuted for allegedly having ordered the illegal spying, when he was head of state, on relatives of the 44 seafarers who died in the sinking of the military submarine ARA San Juan in 2017, according to what was resolved by this Wednesday the judge in charge of the investigation.
Macri was accused of carrying out “prohibited intelligence actions as an author, by virtue of having made possible the production of illegal intelligence tasks, having generated the conditions so that data on people could be carried out, stored and used,” according to the 174-page ruling by federal judge Martín Bava.
The former president and main leader of the center-right opposition in Argentina will face the process in freedom, but the judge prohibited his departure from the country and seized him 100 million pesos (about 943,000 dollars at the exchange of the day), according to the resolution .
“I have said that it is a political persecution that ends in what we all already knew,” Macri reacted to the press in Chile, where he was upon learning of his prosecution, during a visit in his capacity as president of the FIFA Foundation.
For Luis Tagliapietra, plaintiff lawyer and father of one of the deceased crew members, the judge’s ruling “is forceful, very clear, very precise.”
“I feel very tired, I am exhausted, it is four years of fighting and we still have a long way to go. It is an important step that we took, but there is still a long way to go,” Tagliapietra told AFP.
The former Argentine president anticipated that he will appeal the decision of the judge of Dolores (a city located 200 kilometers south of Buenos Aires) before the Federal Chamber of Mar del Plata.
Upon being summoned to an investigatory statement, on November 3, Macri refused to answer questions and limited himself to defending his innocence in a brief presented to the judge, whom he had tried, unsuccessfully, to challenge on two occasions.
“I did not spy on anyone, I never ordered in my government to spy on anyone. I never saw any report of any family member of the ARA San Juan or of any other ship,” Macri said in the letter.
Macri joins a list of 12 indicted in the cause of illegal espionage
The complaint maintains that the relatives of the soldiers who died in the sinking of the ARA San Juan were subject to wiretapping and other interceptions by the Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI) during the year in which they sought to know the fate of the vessel and of the sailors.
During the Macri government “they have lied to us from day one about what happened to our children.” “They have demonized us, they have attacked us, they have spied on us. That spy network was very complete, they have infiltrated us, followed, filmed, photographed. The worst practices of illegal repression, except physical violence,” said Tagliapietra.
The ARA San Juan submarine, a 66-meter-long German-made TR-1700, disappeared in November 2017 with 44 people on board when it made the journey from Ushuaia (3,200 km to the south) to Mar del Plata (400 km to the south of Buenos Aires).
The sunken ship was found a year later, at a depth of 900 meters, with the help of navies from other countries. The complaint maintains that the site of the sinking had been detected much earlier.
In his ruling, the judge considered that “based on the information gathered, the express intentionality and the systematic nature of the documents analyzed in this case, make it possible to affirm that this production of illegal intelligence had an addressee: Mauricio Macri.”
“In all the documents you can see the ideological matrix and the motivational cause that led the AFI to produce this information,” he added.
Macri is the twelfth indicted in this case, for which the then heads of the intelligence services, Gustavo Arribas and Silvia Majdalani, are also charged.
“With the number of defendants there are, we are going to request that the figure of illicit association be aggravated and with it request the preventive detention of the defendants,” anticipated Tagliapietra.
The causes of the sinking are investigated in another file in a court in the city of Caleta Olivia.
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