Cristina Kirchner sat before a federal court in Buenos Aires on Wednesday. She did not do so as an accused of alleged corruption, but as a victim. The former president of Argentina (2007-2015) testified as a witness to the attempted murder two years ago, when a man pulled the trigger on a gun just inches from her head, but the bullet did not come out. She spoke before the three defendants accused of the failed assassination: the gun carrier, Fernando Sabag Montiel; his partner at the time, Brenda Uliarte; and Nicolás Carrizo, who served as the couple’s boss in a street candy sales project. And she complained four times that the investigation had focused on the perpetrators of the attack and did not include “the intellectuals and financiers.”
The former president has been promoting the idea from the beginning of the investigation that the three young men accused did not act on their own initiative. She sees a “political leg” behind them that the judges rejected during the preliminary investigation stage due to lack of evidence. “There was no investigation and those responsible are not in court in this trial,” she said. The room where the hearing was held was packed this morning. Kirchner arrived at the federal courts surrounded by a hundred supporters, most of them under the banner of La Cámpora, the Kirchnerist group headed by her son, Máximo. Former leaders of her government, such as the current governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof, and former ministers of her Cabinet, also came.
On the evening of September 1, 2022, Sabag Montiel mingled with the crowd who gathered every night in front of Kirchner’s house in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Recoleta. She had just been sentenced to six years in prison for corruption and her followers had taken up the routine of supporting her on the street. Sabag Montiel took advantage of the commotion, pulled out a gun and pulled the trigger twice just a few centimeters from Kirchner’s head. The bullets did not come out because the attacker had forgotten to load them in the chamber. Kirchner did not realize at the time what had happened and continued to greet her followers as usual. This Wednesday, she confirmed that it was later that she saw on television the video that clearly showed how close she had been to death. The attacker was not arrested by the former president’s guard, but by supporters who were at the scene at the time. The videos that were later used as evidence also came from her followers’ cell phones.
The investigation determined that the assassination had been planned by Sabag Montiel, his girlfriend and their boss. All three declared in court that they had done it out of hatred towards Kirchner, whom they accused of their financial difficulties. Kirchner and his lawyers were never satisfied with this explanation and demanded that a parallel investigation be opened to find the perpetrators. They even highlighted an alleged “climate of hatred” instigated by the media against her. During his testimony he described the investigation by Judge María Eugenia Capuchetti as “very bad”, but went further and attributed the responsibility for the results of the investigation to “the judicial party”, as he calls the federal court judges he considers his enemies.
Kirchner also regretted that the attack had not been investigated from a gender perspective, which would aggravate the sentences of the accused. It was at that point in her testimony that she referred to the complaint for gender violence that Fabiola Yáñez filed against her husband, the former Peronist president Alberto Fernández. She compared the photo that shows the former first lady with a black eye in the file with the one that a political magazine put in its opening years ago, but with her face. “They took me out with a black eye, look at the current context. As you can see, everything always repeats itself,” she said, looking at the judges and holding the cover high.
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