December is used to being a turbulent month in Argentina. And this year's promises to continue the tradition. After days heating up the political environment, Kirchnerism -in power- mobilizes this Tuesday through the streets of Buenos Aires in the hours before the possible conviction for corruption of its leader, Vice President Cristina Fernández.
The main call for support for Fernández before the federal courts in Comodoro Py, in the Argentine capital, came from the controversial Luis D'Elia, a former Peronist piquetero leader who has been implicated in numerous violent incidents. D'Elia has asked that this Tuesday be "a new October 17", an epic date for Peronism because that day in 1945 a multitude of workers took to the streets and filled the Plaza de Mayo, achieving the release of General Juan Domingo Perón, who had been arrested after being dismissed as Secretary of Labor.
The authorities of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires - in the hands of the opposition mayor Macrista, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta - have reinforced the police presence in the streets in anticipation of incidents and riots if a conviction is handed down against Fernández, especially in the vicinity of Comodoro Py and around the parliament. As her vice president, Cristina Fernández is also president of the Argentine Senate.
However, and although D'Elía responds to Kirchnerism, the main leaders of this Peronist faction have taken care to officially call for support, precisely because they know that incidents may occur.
Fernández herself anticipated her sentence on Monday, in an unusual interview with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo. "Obviously there will be a conviction... The sentence was written on December 2, 2019, the first time I testified in this trial," said the Kirchner leader, who flatly denies having committed any act of corruption and denounces that she is the object of persecution politics.
Fernández assures that this accusation and that of other corruption cases in which she is prosecuted respond to the lawfare orchestrated by the judiciary that, she says, is controlled by the former president and opposition leader Mauricio Macri, with the support of the main media . “Neoliberalism found three new instruments: control the popular will, protect right-wing leaders judicially and through the media, and discipline political leaders so that those who want to defend the excluded think twice,” added Fernández.
The sentence is expected to be made public in the afternoon (tonight, Catalan time). The Prosecutor's Office asks Fernández for twelve years in prison and perpetual disqualification from holding public office for the corruption case called "Vialidad", where twelve other people are also accused, most of them former officials. The oral trial opened three and a half years ago.
The vice president is accused of illicit association and fraudulent administration of public funds for the concession during her presidential term, almost exclusively, of state public works in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz to Austral Construcciones, owned by businessman Lázaro Báez, close to the Kirchner couple. and imprisoned for more than six years.
In Santa Cruz is the political origin of Kircherism, which ruled Argentina between 2003 and 2015, the first four years with the late Néstor Kirchner – who came to power after the serious economic crisis unleashed in December 2001-, and the rest with his wife Cristina Fernández, who is currently and since 2019 vice president of President Alberto Fernández, in a heterogeneous Peronist coalition.
However, the original Peronist unity has mutated into a declared confrontation between the president and the vice president, who is the only leader of the broad movement founded by General Perón who has broad mobilization power in the streets.
At the age of 69, Fernández was the object of an assassination attempt on September 1 in front of the door of his house in Buenos Aires, when, in the framework of a demonstration of support - precisely, after the request for conviction of the Prosecutor for this same cause-, an individual fired a pistol at his face, without any bullet coming out.
There are several detainees for the attack, who apparently acted on their own initiative. Although it has not been shown that there is a significant political link, Fernández insists on denouncing a conspiracy by the Macrista opposition. “Those who are in prison were the material authors of the attack, but I believe there are intellectual authors,” the vice president told Folha de São Paulo. "The judges appointed by Macri protect him and protect those who wanted to kill me, and they do not investigate anything that happened during his government," she added, referring to the former right-wing president, who ruled the country between 2015 and 2019. .
