Of Juan Manuel Abal Medina much and little is known. What no one in the world of politics and the media ignores is that in another era it was chief of staff of Cristina Kirchner. What, on the other hand, fewer people know is that he continues to be an adviser to that portfolio with Alberto Fernandez. Some are also aware that he is the son of his namesake father, the legendary PJ secretary general in the time of Juan Domingo Perón. Of course, there is a fact about him that the vast majority is completely unaware of: that today, in the shadows, Abal Medina is the favorite picketer point guard of the government, Emilio Pérsico, the leader of the Evita Movement. And he spoke to NEWS about it and her current distance from the vice president, among other things.
“Evita seeks popular organization, which is the ABC of Peronism. The organization expires on time. If Peronism continues in Argentina, it is because it built an organization and Evita decided to do the same, give power to those who are outside of everything, to the last in line,” says Abal Medina, who is one of the intellectual creators of the commons partythe brand new electoral tool with which Pérsico and company plan to dispute nothing less than the territory of The slaughter to one of the “barons” of the Conurbano, the Peronist Fernando Espinoza. The candidate for mayor of Pérsico is his partner, Patricia Cubría.
Abal Medina tells that together with Pérsico They set up the party to express to the popular movements that are entering politics, to have their own tool that can serve as a space for negotiations and have strength within the Frente de Todos. He claims to have a good relationship with La Cámpora, but he also accepts that there were moments of tension because both organizations, that of Pérsico and that of the young K, are territorial and compete in the province of Buenos Aires, and that generates differences. However, he acknowledges that this time there is an agreement with Máximo Kirchner for the projected STEP in La Matanza to unseat Espinoza, a rival of the campers. “That’s politics,” he explains. The enemy of my enemy, as the saying goes, is my friend.
BREAKING OFF
Abal Medina was CFK Chief of Staff between 2011 and 2013, but then he distanced himself from her. Although he was sworn into office “by Néstor” and affirms that he continues to be a Kirchner supporter, the truth is that today he speaks of a disenchantment with the current vice president. The break occurred in the 2015 elections, when many leaders of their space thought that it was not so important that Daniel Scioli -the official candidate- won, although he assured that if Mauricio Macri succeeded “he would make a disaster”. He now explains: “I think Cristina never quite wanted to play (for Scioli) and many made her have doubts. That started to make me quite noisy, ”he says.
That was the moment when Fernando “El Chino” Navarro, Pérsico’s partner, took him to the Evita Movement. “He told me: ‘I’m going to convince you to join us.’ And instead of talking to me, he showed me. He took me to different places in Greater Buenos Aires and I saw a poverty that I did not imagine existed in Argentina. And I saw that, at the bottom of the bottom, there were compañeros and compañeros who fought every day, inventing a job. And there he dazzled me, because I saw a different reality. They fight against everything and they put a desire, a force and popular organization into it ”, he says.
Then came the total break with Christianity, when in 2017 he decided with Evita supporting Florencio Randazzo in the legislatures of the province of Buenos Aires. Those more than 5 points of Peronist votes obtained by Randazzo -whom CFK had denied the possibility of facing her in a PASO- ended up sentencing the former president’s defeat against Esteban Bullrich, the macrista candidate.
Randazzo’s campaign manager was Alberto Fernández, by then also facing Cristina. Abal Medina temporizes: “I think her mistake was not having given us the STEP and ours, seeing the results, was not having made the list, we should not have presented ourselves.”
The former chief of staff remembers his father, that general secretary of the movement who was in charge of the Operative Return of Perón in 1972. “My old man says that the problem of politics is when it is confused with morality, when it is spoken, for example, of infiltrators and traitors. When someone starts seeing traitors, they end up like we did.”
