There is an unwritten golden rule in the Argentine Justice: it never messes with the current president, but rather, to judge him, it waits for him to have returned to the plain. Examples abound. Only after leaving power did the judges dare to arrest Carlos Menem and Cristina Kirchner, and prosecute Alberto Fernández, Mauricio Macri and Fernando de la Rúa. It’s not a coincidence.
The case of the former president, convicted by the National Roads file and in full oral trial for the Cuadernos Case, is emblematic. While he retained his influence, even as vice president of a candidate imposed by her, Comodoro Py kept himself at bay. Even the great internal debate in the years of Macrism was whether or not to pressure the judges to move on her and imprison her. The second option prevailed, probably because, even pushed by politics, the magistrates would not have fully advanced against someone who could still return to power, as happened.
Something else demonstrates the Cuadernos Cause that is being aired these days in the oral trial, and that is the transversality of Argentina’s corrupt matrix. For example, there is a construction businessman, Ángelo Calcaterra, Macri’s cousin, who acknowledged having paid bribes to the Kirchner government. He did it to take advantage of the figure of the repentant and thus improve his judicial situation. If what he said is true, it proves that there was no crack in the public works business. Some paid, others received, even if they belonged to antagonistic political tribes.
Even the politicians who are in power today and claim to have come to fight “the caste” could also fall within the same logic if the files that speak of rigged hiring or percentages of alleged bribes like those of Andis are reviewed. But these causes, of course, still advance slowly and do not bother as much. They will only accelerate when those involved return to the plain. Because that’s how the timing of Justice works.
