The moment in which the 1,800 pages of José López’s phone tapping entered the Vialidad case is clear. It was on June 27, when the Federal Oral Court 2 accepted the prosecution’s request to incorporate that evidence, in the last debate hearing prior to the oral trial. On the other hand, the moment in which Cristina Kirchner’s defense found, in that tangle of information, the compromising messages between the former Secretary of Public Works and Nicolás Caputo, Macri’s soulmate, is more diffuse.
In the circle of the vice president they risk that it was during the first days of the plea of the prosecutor Diego Luciani. That is to say: the former president found out about these conversations on time, at the beginning of August, shortly before the live video that she made of her from her office in the Senate and that shook the entire country. It might seem like a debate for historians of the future, but it was this finding that convinced Cristina to change her strategy. It was the turn she was looking for-needing-to go on the attack. It was the excuse that she lacked to try, once again, to save her story. With the economy in freefall and a government on a wire, that’s all he has left.
Street. The vice president was at her home in Recoleta on the night of Monday the 22nd. A few hours earlier Luciani had finished his ninth day of pleadings -almost as many as those made by the prosecutor Julio César Strassera in the Juicio a las Juntas- asking for 12 years in prison and perpetual disqualification from holding public office. CFK had requested to expand his statement, an idea that was denied by the Court, and for that reason he chewed anger in the department of Juncal and Uruguay.
Until that night, those who probed her about the idea of a great mobilization, or a “populated” one as Hebe de Bonafini says, received elusive answers. “Cristina, like every Peronist, knows that we talk on the street,” was the translation made by the cristinista universe of the boss’s wishes. The subtext interpreted by several who know her well was that, like Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, the former president preferred to avoid actions with an uncertain and perhaps tragic ending.
But something struck a chord with her during the intense hours of Monday the 22nd. It was something that loosened the knot of concern that she had choked on by the judicial outpost, a malaise that had become so great that it had led her to let go of supervision of the economy without too much consideration. It is the same nerve that explains that, days after a prosecutor requested such a sentence -in a case in which she is convinced that she will be found guilty-, Cristina is “exultant, as in her best moment”, as she repeats your circle.
It is that that night a “vigil” began, which lasted several days, of thousands of self-convened militants, a postcard that was repeated when on Tuesday the 23rd she spoke from the Senate and a swarm of people also approached there. It was a mobilization that had its counterpart in politics. Most of the Peronist governors -with the conspicuous exception of Gildo Insfrán, from Formosa, and Sergio Uñac, from San Juan-, the CGT, social movements such as Barrios de Pie and Evita, which drags a historical rivalry with Kirchnerism, They came out to support her. Even Miguel Ángel Pichetto and leaders of the PTS -in what caused an internment within the left- joined the wave against the judicial outpost.
Sergio Massa deserves a separate mention. His tweet in defense of the vice president arrived on Monday afternoon-night, when the vast majority of the Front of All had already issued an opinion on the issue -it was at 6:28 p.m., more than an hour after the President’s statement- . The message, which said that it was “absurd to suggest that the Head of the Administration is responsible for each one of his dependents”, also had a much more legal than political tone. It was a message that was read to several bands. It was not only the first time since the Frente de Todos was created that the man from Tigre gave his opinion on Cristina’s legal cases -at the time, the fight against corruption had been one of the great banners of the current minister-, but it was also the only pope of the Renovating Front to come out to defend the vice president, something that neither Malena Galmarini nor any of the ministers who respond to her did. It seems like a game of balance, the kind that Massa is used to, to get along with God and with the devil.
But because of this columning, and the centrality that it gives it, is that CFK, at the time of closing this edition, is “exultant”. Because as long as there are thousands who move to defend it, and as long as Peronism groups behind it, the story has a chance of surviving.
Olives. That same Monday, Cristina received a call from Alberto. It was a long conversation, which was repeated on Tuesday and Wednesday. The relationship between the President and his running mate, in this instance, would seem to have no turning back. There are political differences that were transformed into personal ones, but these days that mud of reproaches had a new chapter and an end that is still uncertain.
The president, who likes to remember his expertise in law on every occasion he has, the position of legal defender of the vice feels very comfortable. It’s a profit whichever way you look at it: he recovers -or thinks he can recover- relationship with CFK and recovers -or so he thinks- political centrality. The conversation between the two – which later had its correlate in which the President changed the agenda for those days so as not to cover CFK’s momentum, although he did not want to get out of the classes he gives on Wednesdays at the UBA – was leveraged by an implicit request for the official leadership. “It’s been a long time since the Government was so united”, a minister is honest, a feeling that explains the support that was seen on the street, in the communiqués and on the networks: the one that denounces Cristina as persecution is, before that everything, an excuse, perhaps the last one, for the Front of All to show itself as a coordinated and strong apparatus. In other words, it is an opportunity for the ruling party to exhibit itself as something that ceased to be a long time ago.
That is why the idea of a presidential pardon raised dust in all the terminals of the ruling party. In the middle of the quagmire it went unnoticed, but the tension generated by this possibility reveals that the tensions between Albertism and Christianity continue to exist beyond the judicial attacks. On the K side of the crack they say that CFK would never accept a pardon, since she does not consider herself guilty, and that this is so clear that the simple idea of fantasizing about him can only have been born of the ill will of the circle that surrounds him. leader. Albertism defends itself with the opposite idea: that it is the cristinistas -former court judge Eugenio Zaffaroni openly asked for it in an interview- who insist on having the possibility at hand. Whether or not the President would be in favor of pardoning her, if that were the case, remains a gray area. “Here, for now, that was never talked about,” they say from Olivos, and “for now” seems to be the most relevant part of this explanation. “It’s that Alberto tries to guess what Cristina wants, to see if she gets her attention back,” they explain close to him. In a column that accompanies this note, the pro-government deputy Eduardo Valdés is clear: “We are not seeking pardons, we demand Justice.”
Drums and cymbals. But Christianity’s first line of defense will be in the streets. Leveraged by what she experienced from her apartment in Recoleta, CFK has already stopped vetoing the idea of a large mobilization. All the cannons point to a march on October 17, with all that that means: it will not only be self-convened militants but also unions, mayors, social movements and governors. Cristina’s statement in her blue plea – “they are for Peronism, not for me” -, plus the request from her balcony in the Senate that they “sing the march”, added to the symbolic coincidence of the date of the mobilization, undresses the game of historical mirrors that the vice wants to do. The other epic that is being attempted is to relate it to the banning of Lula. It is striking: several Latin American leaders expressed their solidarity with her, but not the Brazilian. Perhaps, with the Rio de Janeiro elections just around the corner, it is not convenient for Lula to remain so close to CFK.
In any case, in the ecosystem of the red circle, nobody believes that the vice president will be condemned during this government. One explanation is the judicial times: the sentence in the first instance could arrive in December or February of next year, and then there are the appeals in the Chamber, in the Supreme Court and, eventually, in the Inter-American Court. Not to mention that in the middle, in the 2023 elections, she could become a senator and thus achieve privileges for six more years. In addition, there is the manifest difficulty of proving the figure of illicit association, the crime that is imputed to a democratically elected government. The improbability of a conviction -and much more so with a ban- is an idea that also underlies the K tribune, when they speak of the fact that the judicial advance served them to “recover the mystique.” The effective possibility of a conviction appears several steps behind the political effect it already had.
Future. José de San Martín used a phrase to explain the behavior of human beings in the most difficult moments. “He who drowns does not notice what he grabs,” said the revolutionary hero. It is an idea that he can now apply to the vice president and the wrongs in which a very selective Justice submerges her.
In the midst of an economic crisis, with a fierce adjustment that Massa and his ministry are leading, and in the context of a government divided by the internal ones and with few electoral chances, Cristina does not have much more at hand to defend her figure than to hold on to the politically advanced direction of Justice. It is that the one who drowns is not her, it is the story. Saving him is top priority.
