When the The focus was on the operator Fabián “Pepín” Rodríguez Simónthe cause on the judicial table of macrismo underwent a sudden change. The federal judge María Eugenia Capuchetti decided to resume the investigation about the pressures that officials of the government of Mauricio Macri would have exerted on magistrates and magistrates y that it is no longer the prosecutor Franco Picardi who sets the pace of the file. At the end of last year, Elisa Carrion –leader of the Civic Coalition and one of the founding members of Together for Change– had demanded that Picardi be removed from the direction of the investigation.
Capuchetti has in his hands the hottest cause of recent times, the assassination attempt on Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. In that file, he has already prosecuted Fernando Sabag Montiel, Brenda Uliarte, Nicolás Gabriel Carrizo and Agustina Díaz. CFK itself said that it does not believe that they were the intellectual authors of what happened on September 1 last and His lawyers hope that Capuchetti and the prosecutor Carlos Rívolo escalate towards possible links with the world of politics, intelligence services or point out those who have been able to provide financing to the group that tried to kill the vice president.
Days before the assassination attempt, Capuchetti had informed Picardi that he was going to resume the investigation into the macrista judicial table – according to what emerged from a publication by Financial sphere–. There were not too many explanations about the magistrate’s decision, but there were suspicions on the part of the complainants. “Capuchetti is going to close the case very soon”wrote on Twitter the deputy of the Front of All (FdT) Rodolfo Tailhade.
At the end of last year, Carrió had appeared in the file – without being a party – to ask Capuchetti to fire Picardi. The leader of the Civic Coalition was furious for a reason: the prosecutor had commissioned the Directorate for Judicial Assistance in Complex Crimes and Organized Crime (DAJuDeCO) –which reports to the Supreme Court– to collect the public statements of referents of Cambiemos referring to both the former prosecutor Alejandra Gils Carbó and the member of the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation Ana María Figueroa because the two had denounced having been victims of a smear campaign and public intimidation. Among other things, the report showed that Carrió had asked for the chief prosecutor to be imprisoned.
Simultaneously, former Justice Minister Germán Garavano asked Capuchetti to annul the DAJuDeCO report – in tune with Carrió’s presentation, with whom they do not usually agree on almost anything. The former Secretary of Legal and Technical Pablo Clusellas joined the crusade. Capuchetti agreed: he asked the court office not to continue with the other studies that Picardi had requested and excluded the one that had already been done. Although Picardi appealed, the Buenos Aires Federal Chamber supported the judge’s position.
Like in a game of tweezers, representatives of the Bar Association of the City of Buenos Aires -the private entity of Montevideo street that represents the establishment and does not hide his sympathy for the repressors of the last dictatorship – to ask that Picardi be punished and that the investigation be stopped. The Montevideo Street School had been one of the battering rams of the macrismo against Gils Carbó.
That he is no longer the one leading the investigation is good news for the macrismo and its allies. Even so, Picardi will continue to intervene in the case, he may suggest measures, but he will no longer be the one who sets the pace for the investigation. It is clear that this file will not be a priority for the judge, who has the investigation into the attempted murder of CFK, was on duty and – as this newspaper has been warning – has a limited staff to deal with all the investigations.
Expectations for Pepín
Picardi had been focusing on the role that “Pepín” had in the judicial table of macrismo. The operator –currently a fugitive in Uruguay– was mentioned as the one who threatened Gils Carbó to force his resignation from the Attorney General.
Gabriel De Vedia – former prosecutor and current labor chamberlain – was the one who declared before Picardi that “Pepín” had demanded that Gils Carbó resign. If he didn’t do it, her and her daughters would go to jail, he said. De Vedia met on October 26, 2017 at 4:00 p.m. in the Casa Rosada with Rodríguez Simón. He had managed the meeting because he is a first cousin of “Pepín’s” ex-wife, Soledad De Vedia. In this context, that conversation took place that Gils Carbó took as a clear threat that came from the center of Macri’s power.
“Pepín” ended up confirming the meeting with De Vedia weeks ago in an interview he gave to Radius Profile. He did it after CFK mentioned that he was related to the prosecutor Diego Luciani, who requested twelve years in prison and absolute disqualification to hold public office for her in the trial for public works in Santa Cruz. Rodríguez Simón was a friend of Manuel de Abelleyra, Luciani’s brother-in-law who died during the pandemic.
Picardi had asked the telephone companies for the list of calls that “Pepín” made at the time when Gils Carbó was under siege by macrismo. She got to receive that information, analyzed some communications on key days and requested reports again. It will remain for Capuchetti to analyze what emerges from those requests for reports that were aimed at deciphering who “Pepín” had communicated with before October 30, 2017, when Gils Carbó announced that he was leaving the prosecutor’s office.
The cause
The cause of the judicial table is focused on the pressures that some magistrates and magistrates would have suffered during the Cambiemos era. Among others, Gils Carbó, Figueroa, labor judges Luis Raffaghelli, Enrique Arias Gibert and Mirta González Burbridge, civil chambermaid Marcela Pérez Pardo, judge Martina Forns – who was left with a grenade – and Alejo Ramos are considered victims in the file. Padilla, who became a target of the government of Cambiemos particularly after he uncovered the pot of espionage with the investigation that orbited around the false lawyer Marcelo Sebastian D’Alessio.
Many of these cases had been analyzed by the Rapporteur of the United Nations for the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, Diego García Sayánwho in the last weeks of the Macri government signed a report in which he gave credence to the complaints about a systematic plan to harass magistrates and magistrates who did not agree with the Cambio administration.