There are 1600 accusatory pages that are based on “we have no evidence, but neither do we doubt” or “it is very difficult to obtain evidence in this type of organization, but it is evident that…” or “all the indications point to…” seasoned with hundreds of adjectives that exaggerate to support an inconsistent body. With this hollow formula, the judges limit the right to vote of millions of citizens. The sentence has serious individual consequences for Cristina Kirchner but -as she said in her speech yesterday in Río Negro-, together with the attempt to assassinate her as a consequence of hate speech from the right, breaks the democratic pact of 1983. In other words: it ends with the first forty years of uninterrupted democracy in the more than 200 years of independent life of the country.
The main impact of this ruling is political, as the court itself acknowledges when it tries to deny it. They affirm that it is normal for those accused of these crimes to accuse judges and prosecutors of lawfare or judicial war against political adversaries and that this argument is as old as the history of humanity.
In reality it is the opposite: at least the false accusations against personalities who disagreed with the established power are as old as the history of this country. In 1964, former president Arturo Frondizi published the book “Strategy and tactics of the national movement.” Chapter four is entitled: “Corruption: a pretext to overthrow popular governments.”
Frondizi makes a reminder: Mariano Moreno was accused of corruption when he was already dead. The orator of the revolution, Juan José Castelli, who in those months was dying of tongue cancer, was falsely accused of keeping other people’s money in Upper Peru. General José de San Martín was accused of opening an irregular account in London with other people’s funds.
And the list goes on: when they brought down Hipólito Yrigoyen, they accused him of a lot of deals: that he had kept public funds, that he had not fulfilled his duties as an official, and so on. That happened the first time they put him in jail. When he came out of the second prison, he went to live in his sister’s house: he didn’t have a single peso to support himself.
They are all politicians who stood out for their commitment to fairer and more democratic societies. In unequal societies hegemonized by the interests of economic minorities, these heroes were persecuted with lawfare, because in this way political debate is avoided, in which the privileges of minorities are indefensible and unpopular
Juan Perón was prosecuted for an infinity of economic crimes that were never proven because he had been proscribed, persecuted and exiled. Or the injustice committed against Ramón Carrillo, who had been his Minister of Health and to whom Argentina owes one of the most advanced health systems on the planet.
Carrillo inaugurated dozens of hospitals throughout the country with state-of-the-art equipment, eradicated endemic diseases, created the first drug factory to make medicines cheaper, and was the father of sanitaryism in Argentina. He was falsely accused of corruption, of having stolen millionaire fortunes from the public treasury and had to go into exile in Brazil, where he died in poverty.
It is not about comparing anyone with Cristina Kirchner, but it is about showing that judicial persecution exists, it is not an invention or a fantasy, it comes from a long time ago and has always been used against leaders who were targeted by the established power : the hegemonic economic power, its political representation, in this case the macrismo, and now the media corporation and the Judicial Party.
The technical discussion about the sentence does not make sense. The true foundation is in some of the points of Cristina Kirchner’s master class yesterday in Río Negro where she proposed the construction of democratic hegemony against the forces of authoritarian hatred and developed a proposal for a country without dependence or inequality, with a high participation of wages. of workers in GDP. It is a proposal that has the recognition of universities, unions and millions of Argentines.
The voices that, playing dumb, wanted to defend the conviction with paternalistic jurisprudence classes, are marked by their functionality with macrismo and media corporations, by their columns in the hegemonic media and their silences in the face of macrista corruption. The ruling is essentially political and has serious consequences for democratic institutions.
The country that he leaves for the future is that of new generations disillusioned by a false democracy where the Judicial Party interferes with proposals for change. This country formed generations disillusioned by the permanent intervention of the Military Party, young people who looked for other ways to make their dreams and hopes heard.
The vice president warned about the increasing discredit of politics in society. “We do not deserve such a flat debate” was her last reflection in yesterday’s talk, in which the public acclaimed her as in all her presentations and interrupted her several times with the chorus of “Cristina presidenta”.
His ban rebounds in the next elections because it delegitimizes them by prohibiting his candidacy. The timing of the trial and the announcement of this sentence and its grounds were carefully designed to coincide with the beginning of electoral times, very shortly before the deadline for submitting candidacies.
And if the elections are delegitimized, their result will follow the same fate. The winning candidate will be a president without legitimacy. Even with the vulnerability that, in a globalized world, his decisions may be questioned when political circumstances change, as they did with Perón.
Talking now about such drastic change of contexts and scenarios may seem stupid, but the grounds of the sentence are only sustained in the current context conditioned by the permanent hate speech and defamation against Cristina Kirchner. Outside of that context they are unsustainable.
Discussing the figure of the “necessary guarantor”, brought from the “German jurisprudence”, are dilettante flirts when they cannot effectively prove whether there was overpricing or favoritism in the road works in question. Everything is a great simulation to hide the reactionary political essence of the condemnation.
It is probable that Cassation and the Court, the two remaining appeal instances, will dose the times until a final conviction is reached in a process that tries to avoid this scenario of delegitimacy that would spill over like a cascade on the elections, their result and on the next president. The excuse that it is not proscribed because the sentence is not yet final serves them to formally avoid the strong figure of the proscription. But the sentence is exhaustive by prohibiting him from holding public positions.
The way to transform this reality with a democracy amputated by the Judicial Party is the formation of democratic hegemonies, the vice president pointed out in her speech.
