One day after knowing the grounds of her sentence to six years in prison, the vice president assures that the powers of the republic do not work
“How are we today, 40 years from democracy? In Argentina it seems that not even the three powers (of the republic) work“. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner took just one day to respond to the disclosure of the grounds for the six-year prison sentence and permanent disqualification from holding public office in the context of a case for corruption in public works during their governments (2007 -15). The sentence, he said, is the result of the weight in this country of what he called the “judicial party”, a “mafia” that operates in alliance with the right-wing opposition, and which is behind a sentence written without “any proof”, and whose only objective, he assured, “is the proscription”.
Fernández de Kirchner received an honorary doctorate from a Patagonian university. His intervention garnered applause from his followers, especially when he said that “we are not in a democratic state Constitutional”. However, she did not offer definitions about her role in the face of the October elections. Although she once again considered herself “outlawed”, Kirchnerism insists on raising her candidacy as the only possibility of stopping the return of the right to power in December The opposition assures that she could run for any elective position because the sentence is not final and there are still two judicial instances to go through.
For the vice president, the conviction and the assassination attempt are convergent episodes. With the attack, she repeated, “the democratic pact” that had been in place since the return of democratic institutions in 1983 was broken. When the cycle of horror of the last dictatorship was left behind, a consensus was generated that “one could not even think that the suppression of the adversary“. The night of September 1 when they tried to shoot him twice, another political moment was inaugurated in Argentina. “I hated being the protagonist of that.” The vice president pointed against María Eugenia Capuchetti, the judge in charge of investigating that episode. The lawyers of Fernández de Kirchner have challenged his performance for the refusal to investigate the masterminds behind the failed assassination.
The burden of debt
The vice president makes sporadic interventions during which she slides criticism, sometimes veiled, other times explicit, towards the government of which she is a part and which she heads Alberto Fernandez. One of the reasons for the distancing is related to the terms of the agreement reached with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to refinance a debt of 45,000 million dollars contracted by the previous right-wing administration. This understanding meant a strong adjustment in the economy that caused strong social discontent.
“There is no bigger catastrophe for Argentina than the indebtedness that occurred in the government between 2015 and 2019,” he said. In his opinion, Peronism and its adversaries have no other way out than to jointly demand another refinancing of that enormous liability. “The conditions under which the agreement with the IMF was signed will have to be reviewed. Review, not to avoid paying, but to be able to grow.”
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In turn, he warned about the consequences that Argentina would adopt the dollar as its currency. That is the proposal of the far-right candidate, Javier Milei, for now third in the polls. “If dollarization occurs, the great sacrifice will fall on the Argentine middle classes. The impoverishment will have no limit. We have to think a little more, we can’t keep buying more colored mirrors.”
the peruvian mirror
Peronism does not currently have a competitive candidate in the October elections. The polls predict that he would be defeated by any conservative option in a second round. “I am afraid of political fragmentation“, expressed Fernández de Kirchner and gave as an example the political and institutional instability in Peru. “In 2011, two political parties had 65% of the votes there. Today no candidate reaches more than 20”. Part of the Argentines, who have turned their backs on the ruling party in the 2021 parliamentary elections, “remain convinced that politicians are the bad guys”. However, he remarked, it is the economic measures those that distance society from the rulers.