“The signatories express our absolute rejection of the unjustifiable judicial persecution that the current vice president of the Argentine Republic, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has been suffering.”
Thus begins a statement released by four presidents of the region two days after a prosecutor in Buenos Aires ask for 12 years in prison and the disqualification to hold public office for the former president, who governed Argentina between 2007 and 2015.
Kirchner is accused of the crimes of fraudulent administration and illicit association for allegedly directing public works in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz – which her husband, former president Néstor Kirchner, governed for more than a decade – to favor a partner and allegedly figurehead.
The vice president, whose defense will present her final argument in September, has used social networks to affirm her innocence and ensure that she is the victim of a “media-judicial firing squad”
On Wednesday, several presidents ratified this position, strongly criticizing the Argentine justice system and assuring that “this persecution aims to remove Cristina Fernández de Kirchner from public, political and electoral life.”
The Argentine president Alberto Fernández, the Bolivian Luis Arce, the Mexican Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the recently elected Gustavo Petro, from Colombia – all leftist leaders -, assured that this “harassment” seeks to “bury the values and ideals that it represents. [Kirchner]with the ultimate goal of implementing a neoliberal model.
In addition, they demanded “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 several of these cases” against the vice president be taken into account.
The judgments
Since leaving power in December 2015, Kirchner has been prosecuted in nearly a dozen court cases.
Five of the cases were brought to trial, but only this one, known as the “road case”, reached the stage of final arguments.
In three of the processes, the judges dismissed the former president before the trial began, considering that there was no crime.
And one, the so-called “cause of the corruption notebooks”, in which Kirchner is also accused of leading an illicit association that collected money from bribes from public works, still has no start date.
“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,” the regional leaders said in their statement.
“In other cases that are still open, the bad procedural practices leading to the elimination of Fernández de Kirchner from political life are revealed,” they denounced in the document, which was published on the official website of the Argentine government.
Other supports (and some silences)
The Argentine vice president has received a whole cataract of support since the request for imprisonment and disqualification against her was known.
From her partners in the ruling coalition, the Frente de Todos, to the leadership of Peronism, the force that encompasses Kirchnerism, who have called for a great march to support her.
His followers even stationed themselves in front of his residence in Buenos Aires, in one of the most exclusive -and most anti-Peronist or gorilla- neighborhoods in the country, from where they warn with chants: «If they touch Cristina, what a quilombo (mess) is going to happen? to assemble”.
From abroad they also showed their support for Kirchner the Chairwoman of Honduras, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, and her husband, former President Manuel Zelaya.
Our solidarity with @CFKArgentina. We condemn the ‘lawfare’ attack against the fellow Vice President. The use of judicialization of politics constitutes an attack against democracy. #TodosConCristina
– Xiomara Castro de Zelaya (@XiomaraCastroZ) August 23, 2022
The president of Peru, Pedro Castillo, also sent his solidarity via Twitter, noting that “all judicial investigations must be conducted with full respect for democracy, the rule of law and due process.”
However, some media in Argentina highlighted the silence of two left-wing Latin American leaders: the young president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, and the former president and current Brazilian presidential candidate Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, who was imprisoned for a corruption sentence. which was later annulled, a situation that many Kirchnerists compare to that of their leader.
The controversial defense of Alberto Fernández
But no one was more vocal in his defense of the vice president than Alberto Fernández, the man she chose to lead a presidential binomial in 2019.
Minutes after prosecutor Diego Luciani requested a prison sentence for Kirchner, the president published on his networks an official statement from the presidency condemning the “judicial and media persecution of the vice president.”
“None of the acts attributed to the former president has been proven,” said the document, which stated that “this persecution and search for proscription (…) is part of similar attempts carried out against other popular leaders when justice is put at the service of powers that be.”
On Wednesday night, Fernández – who in the past was a harsh critic of his now ally – again defended his vice president during a television interview with journalists from the TN channel, from the Clarín group, considered to be in opposition to the government.
His words were harshly criticized by opposition leaders who considered that the head of state was pressuring the justice system.
Fernández was even criminally denounced by deputies from the opposition Civic Coalition for making a controversial comparison between prosecutor Luciani and his counterpart Alberto Nisman, who was found dead, shot in the head, after accusing Cristina Kirchner of having conspired with Iran to cover up those suspected of being responsible for a terrorist attack in 1994.
Asked by journalists about the safety of prosecutor Luciani, he said: “Encouraging the idea that what happened to Nisman could happen to Luciani… so far what happened to Nisman is that he committed suicide. So far nothing else has been tried. I hope that prosecutor Luciani does not do something like that.”