Desperate steps are being taken in Argentina to silence, isolate, and even kill former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was sentenced to a six-year jail term in a fraudulent 2022 corruption case and banned for life from holding any political office. Although the Supreme Court upheld her conviction in mid-June, after which an appeals court permitted her to serve her term under house arrest, that didn’t satisfy corrupt prosecutors who demanded her house arrest be revoked and she be sent to an ordinary prison where she would be denied all security. She is guaranteed this security as a former head of state, made more urgent because of the attempt on her life on Sept. 1, 2022. No matter, the original prosecutors in her case, Diego Luciano and Sergio Mota, say her crimes are so heinous that she deserves harsher punishment.
Kirchner committed no crime, but she is a powerful woman—an outspoken pro-development, two-time President, a former Vice-President, and the president of the national Justicialista (Peronist) Party, the main opposition to President Javier Milei’s Austrian School nation-wrecking policies. Not only does she have huge support inside Argentina—1 million people demonstrated to support her on June 18 after the Supreme Court upheld her conviction—but also throughout Ibero-America, where current and former heads of state and political leaders have rallied to her defense.
Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s July 3 visit to her at her apartment, for which he had to obtain court permission, was of major political importance felt domestically and internationally. This was not only because of their decades-long personal friendship, but also because of its international impact, badly destabilizing the deranged Milei and highlighting that both Lula and Cristina have been victims of politically motivated “lawfare.” Pictures of the two together were splashed all over the Ibero-American and other international media, and other current or former heads of state will want to visit her also.
At today’s hearing, lead prosecutor Mario Villar announced he would not revoke Kirchner’s house arrest because she has not violated any of its strict conditions. He did say, however, he would consider other prosecutors’ demands that she be relocated from her Buenos Aires apartment to another less-accessible location allegedly because supporters who gather around her Buenos Aires apartment building “disturb” the neighborhood. One proposal is that she be moved to Calafate in the southern Patagonian province of Santa Cruz, or to some other remote location where contact with others would be limited. Cristina’s lawyers are challenging the onerous conditions of her house arrest, including the ridiculous insistence she wear an electronic anklet, as if she were a flight risk. The conditions imposed on her are far stricter than those of former members of the 1976-80 military dictatorship who committed horrific atrocities and are allowed great freedoms while under house arrest.
