The president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, asked this Tuesday (4) that the country’s courts “investigate without delay and resolve the various responsibilities” for the alleged use of the intelligence service during the government of his predecessor, Mauricio Macri, to carry out illegal pursuits.
“The Federal Court is investigating a complaint that I ordered the Federal Intelligence Agency to make to investigate actions by the previous government that promoted illegal espionage and various legal prosecutions against union members and opponents,” wrote Fernandez on his Twitter account.
The Argentine president referred to the controversy opened last week, when statements made in 2017 by the then Minister of Labor of the Province of Buenos Aires and now opposition leader Marcelo Villegas were released, in which he criticized the actions of union members and mentioned the possibility of establishing “a Gestapo” (official secret police of Nazi Germany) against them.
In a video presented to Justice by the Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI), with images that belong to a June 2017 archive, Villegas appears at a meeting with government officials and businessmen for the supposed planning of a strategy to promote legal proceedings against unionists.
Fernández added that at the beginning of his administration he denounced “the existence of more than one hundred encrypted cell phones provided by the AFI that included national civil servants, as well as people from the judiciary and political and commercial partners of Mudemos”, a coalition with which Macri became president in 2015.
The Argentine president stated that these devices were assigned to the former governor of the province of Buenos Aires, María Eugenia Vidal; the attorney general of the province of Buenos Aires, Julio Conte Grand; Daniel Angelici, former president of the Boca Juniors football club; to the former justice minister of the province of Buenos Aires Gustavo Ferrari; to businessman Nicolas Caputo; and the former attorney general of the city of Buenos Aires Martín Ocampo, among others.
Fernández questioned the existence of these encrypted phones, among other questions, and demanded an answer.
“The use of the rule of law intelligence service to carry out internal espionage and promote criminal prosecution is definitely repugnant and therefore inadmissible,” said Fernández.
Macri has not yet commented on this complaint, but at the end of last year, he said he has been a victim of “political persecution”, commenting on the decision of a federal judge who made him a defendant for espionage and abuse of authority in the case in which he is accused of having ordered the families of the 44 crew members of the ARA San Juan de la Armada submarine, which was found sunk in 2018, a year after it disappeared, to be spied on. The complaint was made by the AFI in 2020, after the beginning of Fernández’s government.
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