Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has added the support of three presidents of the region. The Mexican Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Colombian Gustavo Petro and the Bolivian Luis Arce signed this Wednesday a letter of repudiation of what they considered an “unjustifiable judicial persecution” against the Argentine vice president. The text says that the request for 12 years in prison for alleged corruption presented by a prosecutor only seeks to “remove Kirchner from public, political and electoral life, as well as to bury the values and ideals that he represents, with the ultimate goal of implanting a neo-liberal model”. The presidents endorse the persecutory thesis put forward by the ruling Peronism, but they go a step further. “We demand that the conclusions of the Report of the United Nations Special Rapporteurship of 2019 that questioned the independence of the magistrates and lawyers involved” in the cases against Kirchner, says the text, which also bears the signature of the president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández.
Prosecutor Diego Luciani finished reading the allegations on Monday in the so-called Vialidad case, a file that investigates an alleged illicit association created by the Kirchnerist governments to get hold of part of the money from public works. The accusation considers that at the head of that association was Cristina Kirchner, seconded by her Minister of Public Works, Julio de Vido, and the secretary of the same ministry, José López. At the base of the pyramid, he placed Lázaro Báez, a construction businessman who took over 80% of the infrastructure works in the province of Santa Cruz, the political cradle of the former president and her husband, also former president Néstor. Kirchner.
“The harassment of the Argentine vice president is carried out by accusing her political opponents, journalistic headlines and judicial irregularities that violate due process and legal guarantees. In recent years, the judiciary has opened numerous cases against him, many of which have had to be shelved in the absence of any type of solid evidence,” says the letter signed by the Latin American presidents. “The so-called Vialidad cause is emblematic. There, the court denied the vice president the power to expand her statement after the prosecutor’s request for 12 years in prison and perpetual disqualification from holding public office, thus violating the legitimate right to defense, ”she adds. The court denied Kirchner the floor because it considered that the request was out of time.
The vice president then decided to give her arguments in a live connection on social networks from her office in the Senate. She said that the trial she faces is a “fiction” that seeks to attack “all Peronism.” She also presented conversations between José López, one of the accused Public Works officials, and a construction businessman linked to former President Mauricio Macri. She wanted to show that López, imprisoned since he tried to hide bags with nine million dollars in a convent, acted behind his back. Kirchner managed to mobilize behind him a Peronism that until now was divided into multiple internal currents. He now added three presidents of the region.
The Casa Rosada wanted to give the menu the widest possible publicity and played a surprise. Without prior notice, Fernández’s spokeswoman, Gabriela Cerruti, summoned the accredited journalists to the press room and read the text without accepting questions. The signatories make up an axis of progressive governments that has just been reinforced with the arrival of Gustavo Petro to power in Colombia. The only thing missing was for the Chilean Gabriel Boric to join. The demand of the heads of state to take into account a UN report that three years ago asked the government of Mauricio Macri to address a series of complaints about “the independence of Argentine magistrates and lawyers” has been a novelty.
The commission worked in 2019 at the request of three local organizations, including the Justice Initiative, made up of Kirchner’s defense attorney, Alberto Beraldi. The commission’s rapporteur, Diego García-Sayán, considered that the complaints received were “sufficiently reliable to indicate that there is an issue that warrants immediate attention.”
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