Diego Cabotthe journalist The Nation which in 2018 revealed the existence of the notebooks in which the former driver Oscar Centeno For ten years, he recorded the trips of Kirchnerist officials to raise money from businessmen, he declared this Tuesday as a witness in the oral trial that is taking place before the Federal Oral Court 7 by Comodoro Py. The hearing lasted more than twelve hours, the longest held so far in the process.
“Diego Hernán Cabot. I am a journalist,” he appeared before the court at the beginning of the day. What came next was a detailed account of how the material that would lead to the most resonant corruption case in recent years in Argentina came into his hands.
Cabot explained that it was his neighbor Jorge Bacigalupowith whom he maintained occasional contact due to the latter’s interest in journalism, who entrusted him with a box with eight notebooks. In these notebooks, the former driver of the Ministry of Planning had recorded trips by Kirchner officials from 2005 to 2015, many of them intended to raise money from businessmen. “I opened it up and started working on the material that was there,” Cabot said. “The notebooks were original,” he stated when asked by the prosecutor. Fabiana Leon. He described them as “the typical log of someone who has to bill for the service”: a driver who wrote down absolutely everything—origin, destination and reason for each trip.
At the end of the hearing, the court physically showed him the original notebooks. Cabot recognized them without hesitation: “Yes, these are them. These are the records on which we work.”
The journalist also recounted how he put together the investigation team, recruiting colleagues Candela Ini and Santiago Nasra to convert annotations into a structured database. “We did the heavy work outside of writing hours,” he said. In a section of that investigation, which extended from January to April 2018, he returned the notebooks to Bacigalupo because Centeno was claiming themand then in October 2019 an unknown man summoned him to a corner near the newspaper and returned six of the eight original notebooks without saying a single word. “He told me ‘I have this to give you and I’m leaving,’ and he left,” she recalled. Cabot also took that material to court.
One of the points that concentrated the greatest tension was Cabot’s decision to present the complaint directly to the prosecutor. Carlos Stornelliquestioned by several of the accused for alleged pressure to accuse Cristina Kirchner. The journalist explained that Stornelli was the only prosecutor he knew, since he was investigating the Liquefied Natural Gas case in which several of the same names appeared. They met in a bar in Núñez: “He told me that the only thing that could encourage the information he had to be investigated was to file a complaint. And that’s how it happened.”
The defense tried on several occasions to get Cabot to reveal which businessmen he had met with during the investigation, but the court ruled in favor of the journalist and protected the secrecy of the sources, after more than an hour of deliberation. They also questioned him about a possible loss of objectivity due to having simultaneously been a journalist and a whistleblower. “The loss of objectivity regarding my work is a pertinent question for readers,” Cabot responded.
The audience continued in the room Carlos Beraldithe defense lawyer of Cristina Kirchner, identified by the prosecution as the head of the illegal collection mechanism. Rye, turned into protected and repentant witnesswas also present. Ini and Nasra are scheduled for Thursday. Prosecutor León had initially requested the declaration of almost 900 witnessesalthough this Tuesday a group of almost a hundred gave up.
