On September 1, 2022, Fernando Sabag Montiel fired a Bersa pistol inches from the head of former Argentine President Cristina Kirchner. The bullet did not come out because the attacker, of Brazilian origin and then 35 years old, had forgotten to place it in the chamber. This Wednesday, Sabag Montiel, his ex-girlfriend, Brenda Uliarte, and their boss, Nicolás Carrizo, sat before the federal court that will try them in Buenos Aires.
“The idea was to kill Cristina. I wanted to kill her,” said Sabag Montiel in a calm and cold tone in his statement. Asked about the reasons, he listed coldly: “Because she is a thief, because she is a murderer, because she led Argentina to inflation. Personally, I felt humiliated for going from being a person who had a good economic situation to being a seller of sugar flakes” on the street.
There is little doubt about their material responsibility and the defense will seek to prove that they were not in their right mind when they planned the attack. The former president’s lawyers are not entirely convinced by the trial: they have been demanding for months that an investigation be carried out to determine whether there were politically linked masterminds behind the attack.
About 300 witnesses will pass through the federal courts. The figure is enormous. The failed assassination occurred in the midst of the crowd that almost two years ago gathered every day in front of Kirchner’s house in Recoleta, a wealthy neighborhood in the Argentine capital. She thus expressed her support for the former president in the final stretch of a corruption case in which she would finally be convicted. Sabag Montiel was captured by the former president’s followers and his assassination attempt was recorded by television cameras. Those same cameras showed how Brenda Uliarte secretly walked away from the place. Analysis of the defendants’ cell phones quickly led to Carrizo, the third defendant. Carrizo was the couple’s boss in a project selling sugar flakes on the street. In his first statement, he said that he had no idea what his employees had planned, but the chats soon showed that the assassination plan had at least two months of preparation and even a couple of failed attempts.
“I’m going to go to Cristina’s house and I’m going to shoot her. If it’s not me, it’ll be another sick person,” Montiel told his girlfriend in a WhatsApp message. She was not far behind. “Today I’m turning into San Martin, I’m going to order Cristina’s death. I sent a guy to kill Cristina, I didn’t pay him, he’s also hot on her,” she wrote to a friend, referring to her boyfriend. “I wanted to kill her and she wanted me to die,” Sabag Montiel summarized when asked about her relationship with Blenda Uliarte. “She listened to my ideas and where I wanted to go. She wasn’t sure what I could do, maybe she took it as a child’s game, or a show of bravery to look good with people and not as something serious. That made things complicated for her, but there was no stopping her from saying ‘let’s not do this’, we could end up in jail.
The conversations were part of the reading of the arguments that the complaint and the prosecution presented to bring the case to trial. The defendants were listening in the same wood-paneled courtroom where the terrorist attack that destroyed the Amia Jewish mutual fund in Buenos Aires in 1984 was tried. Sabag Montiel, with a long beard, unkempt hair and a red coat. When he had face to face with the photographers he showed a paper where he had written “they have kidnapped me.” The person responsible for the missed shot sat far from his lawyers, alone, about five meters from Blenda Uliarte, his ex-girlfriend.
Dressed in a coat with Scottish motifs, Uliarte remained petrified during the hearing, not paying attention to her defender. She stood up in an intermediate room, so that her handcuffs could be placed on her. She turned her head and stared blankly at the journalists who were following the trial behind protective glass. What happened with Carrizo was something else: dressed in a blue jacket and white shirt, he talked all the time with his lawyer and didn’t sit still. He is accused of being a secondary participant in the attack, a kind of small-time instigator, leader of The little glassesas the press called them for living off the sale of sugar flakes in squares and parks.
The trial will have a long parade of witnesses. The star moment will be the presence of Cristina Kirchner, scheduled for after winter. This Wednesday she was represented by her lawyers, who insisted that progress must be made in identifying the intellectual authors of the failed assassination. “The judge divided the case in two and preserved everything that has to do with the possible existence of a political or economic line behind the attack,” complains Marcos Aldazabal, of the complaint. “What has been left out has to do with different evidence that has emerged throughout these almost two years that could link people from the political sphere. On the first day of the investigation, the main defendant’s phone number was deleted under unknown circumstances. Today we have three people who were visibly involved, but not in the general context,” he says.
The deleted phone number is at the root of the suspicions in the complaint. The chats that were broadcast this Wednesday show conversations between Blenda Uliarte and Nicolás Carrizo between themselves and with third parties, but nothing from Sabag Montiel, the person responsible for pulling the trigger.
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