Argentina was seconds from a catastrophe. The attempted assassination of Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner not only splits the history of the last 40 years of democratic life in two. What happened is not related only to the eventual act of an unbalanced person. It is not yet known if I act alone. The only certainty at this time is that the revolver did not work, but the failed attack made the impossible possible: to install in this country once again the possibility of death for political reasons.
The context of the attack
The tension has been installed on the horizon from the moment that the prosecutor Diego Luciani requested 12 years in prison and the permanent disqualification of Fernández de Kirchner for considering her the head of a “illicit association” linked to the public works business during their governments (2007-15). The right-wing opposition and a sector of the media welcomed the request. Francisco Sánchez, a deputy of the PRO, the party of former president Mauricio Macri, came to say that the statesmen convicted of corruption cases deserve the death penalty. Peronism, the party in power, considered that Luciani lacks evidence and that the court has proven to be biased and part of a plot that seeks the banning of the vice president for the 2023 elections, as happened in Brazil in 2018 with Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. She claimed to be the target of a “shooting” media and judicial, without knowing that, weeks later, two shots missed in front of his face.
Showdown days
From that moment on, hundreds of Cristina’s followers set up a permanent vigil around your house. The police of the city of Buenos Aires decided to carry out a violent eviction. The mistreatment and beatings made no distinction between ordinary citizens and legislators. On some balconies of adjoining buildings, uniformed men filmed the protesters, bringing back memories of other times when intelligence agents took pictures of political militants who were later killed or disappeared during the last military dictatorship (1976-83). Fear of escalation was in the air. “The attack against Cristina Kirchner is the result of ‘them or us,'” said former Supreme Court minister Raúl Zaffaroni.
A history of hate
The great historians of Peronism, among them Frenchman Alain Rouquiéconsider that the most intense emotional force in Argentina is that which emanates from those who have opposed by all means to John Peron between 1946 and, nine years later, his overthrow. Buenos Aires was the scene of the most important bombardment against the civilian population after the Guernicaon June 16, 1955. In 1956, the military regime that overthrew Perón sanctioned Law 4161 that prohibited pronouncing the names of the exiled general and his late wife, Eva Duarte, whose corpse came to be harassed. “If it weren’t for the clumsiness of anti-Peronism, Peronism wouldn’t have lasted so long,” estimates Rouquié. The appearance of Kirchnerism, in 2003, but especially after 2008, when the then president clashed with large agricultural producers over soybean income, reactivated those feelings that seemed to be part of the past.
The death drive
The return of peronismor to power, at the end of 2019, took to another plane the anger of sectors of a right that has acquired new forms. Social networks have become a permanent incitement to assassination, even during the pandemic, when the presidency of Alberto Fernandes of “infection & rdquor ;. Summary trials have been staged at some marches. Mortuary bags with the names of the main figures of the Government have been left in front of the door of the headquarters of the Executive. Fantasy is the order of the day. A few hours before the assassination attempt, Roberto Garcia Moritan, a right-wing legislator who became famous for marrying a well-known model, proposed demolishing the emblematic building of the Ministry of Social Development to “improve circulation.” There you can see two images of Eva Perón that are illuminated at night and are intolerable for anti-Peronism. The serious economic crisis of a country with 40% poor and with the specter of collapse on the horizon, it is an unavoidable component to understand the present.
dangerous background
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The dictator Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, responsible for a series of executions of Peronists in 1956, was kidnapped in 1970 and later executed by the nascent Montoneros guerrilla. Never before had a former president been assassinated in Argentina. But Latin America is not exempt from extremely serious cases. Luis Donaldo Colosio, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of Mexico, was shot in the head that ended his life on March 23, 1994. On the same March 23, although in 1999, he was assassinated on Luis María street. Argaña, then Vice President of Paraguay. Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed in 2018, in the middle of the electoral campaign. Evo Morales was on the verge of losing his life after his overthrow in November 2019. Lula has decided to carry out his electoral campaign with a bulletproof vest. Now it is in Buenos Aires where the word assassination has ceased to sound like an insane fact.