Cristina Fernández de Kirchner knows that brave times are ahead for her. She knows it because she knows what she, the late Néstor Kirchner and her son Máximo did when it came to managing and increasing the family assets. And she knows it because she knows what Argentine judges and prosecutors are like, exceptional timekeepers and owners of an exquisite sense of smell that allows them to detect where power is, who has it and who loses it… and they act accordingly.
Fernández de Kirchner knows this because for years he encouraged and benefited from the talent of many Argentine magistrates to dance to the rhythm of power. It will be enough to remember, to cite just one pathetic example, how federal judge Norberto Oyarbide dismissed her and her husband in the criminal investigation for illicit enrichment in an express procedure whose end he signed when an emissary squeezed him “by the neck” and in his office . Literal.
The vice president knows it, too, without having to read the profuse academic analyzes of the University of Rochester professor, Gretchen Helmke, who dedicated years and more years to analyzing more than 15,000 rulings of the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice to detect what called the “logic of strategic defection.” Translated into Spanish: judges who make decisions accommodating to power.
Fernández de Kirchner knows this because she didn’t believe it, but she did encourage that dynamic. This is what he did, to give another example, when he reformed the Judicial Council – the body in charge of appointing and removing the Nation’s judges – for the sake of a proclaimed “democratization of Justice” that in reality was quite the opposite. until the Supreme Court struck down that reform and returned the Council to its previous version.
The vice president knows this, of course, because she saw former president Carlos Menem walk that same path of impunity and ostracism, whom she reviled and mocked with her husband in public, such as when the man from Rioja was sworn in as national senator in 2005. and Néstor Kirchner touched his testicle to ward off bad luck. Because Menem, who had enjoyed judicial loyalty and an “automatic majority” that protected him from the Supreme Court while he occupied the Casa Rosada, paraded through the courts until his death, often cited by several of those same magistrates who had him. flattered
Fernández de Kirchner knows this so much that he tried everything to avoid Menem’s path. How to fight for judicial reform and to expand the Supreme Court since he returned to power in December 2019. And that is how he denounced time and again that he was a victim of a lawfare -that is, a political persecution carried out through the judiciary-, but not even the Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva -who was a victim of a rigged judicial process in his country-, refused to meet with her when she came from official tour to Buenos Aires.
His preaching – but above all his power – brought some benefits to Cristina Fernández. Since she returned to the Government in 2019, she has achieved several criminal dismissals; some predictable, others questionable. But he was not able to weather all the storm fronts before Alberto Fernández’s government began to say goodbye to the Casa Rosada, cornered by terrible management. And many judges and prosecutors, exceptional timekeepers, owners of an exquisite sense of smell, know that power veers towards other shores.
Thus, the reopening of the Hotesur and Pact with Iran files will bring to the dock the woman who once stated that you only had to fear God and “a little bit” of her. If successful, she could add two more sentences to the one she already has in the Roads case for corruption crimes. And although she will never step foot in a cell because she is over 70 years old, her present and future are ominous. She knows it and the judges and prosecutors, hounds of power, know it.
Now, Cristina Fernández needs Axel Kicillof to retain the province of Buenos Aires as a refuge and bastion for the next few years, from there to dream of an eventual return to power if the planets align. Only in this way will she avoid an end similar to that of Menem. And only in this way will she achieve that the judges and prosecutors once again align themselves with her designs.
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