Cristina Kirchner The roles of its main political interlocutors are well defined. Yes Maximum He is his most direct battering ram, who carries with him the weight and responsibility of keeping the surname alive, Peter’s Wado For the Vice President, he is the man of the assignments that require work, discretion or, directly, that require that there is no Kirchner in the room. When you have to talk to the countryside, with important businessmen who have always looked askance at Christianity -as Marcos Galperín, Eduardo Elsztain, Pierpaolo Barbieri, Martín Eurenkian and Cristiano Ratazzi-, with the opposition, with the Justice, with the media priests or even with the envoys of countries like the United States, it is “Wado” the CFK ambassador. Rather, it is “the Chancellor”, a nickname used by several in that space to refer to him.
It is so important Peter’s For her, he is the only one of the 21 ministers with whom she maintains a direct and fluid relationship. It’s her man in the Cabinet and in the Rosadaand it is in fact the dispatch of “Wado” the one who CFK he wears on the rare occasions he visits the government house. The role the Vice gave him suits him well: this founder of The Campora he has the ideas of that organization but refined manners, a fresh humor, a relaxed handling of conversations, a tragic personal story that sensitizes even the toughest opponent and a speech deficiency that makes him, like any good antihero, human . De Pedro is hard Kirchnerism but with good manners.
GOVERNMENT
This is why the leader of the space insisted that De Pedro is part of the Cabinet, even though he, at first, did not want to. When Albert Fernandez, At the end of 2019, he summoned him to join the team, Wado demanded only one condition when taking the place of the Ministry of the Interior: that the then president-elect accept that he was never going to speak in public. Although not so much time passed, at that time De Pedro was terrified of speeches, and the only one who had been able to convince him to do the opposite was Néstor Kirchner, a week before his death, when he forced him to give a talk – the first he did as a political reference- before five thousand agricultural producers in Mar del Plata.
Fernández, with a waist, conceded to De Pedro his request as a silent minister, but Elena Lima, Wado’s wife, did not believe that promise was achievable. That is why, that day when De Pedro returned to his home, he found some old oratory books that his partner had left ready for him on the dining room table. “And as always, she was right”, De Pedro finishes off that anecdote.
In fact, when Wado speaks of “the boss” does not refer to CFK. It was noticed on the evening of Wednesday, February 9, when he interrupted a meeting due to a call from “the boss.” It was not the Vice President, who has been silent since the agreement with the Fund was announced, but it was Lima, with whom he has been married since 2014, to remind him that for the performance of “Petroleum”, a canchera work that is in the Metropolitan , they had to be ten minutes before 20.
Both have been sleeping little due to the birth, six months ago, of their second child, and that was the first time they would go to the theater in four years – the last one was also at the request of his wife. The Minister of the Interior complied with the scheduled time and arrived on time. With an eccentricity: more than one confused him with the actor Stephen Lamothe: with chinstraps they are almost indistinguishable.
The account of that Wednesday, then, gave a play seen, a satisfied couple and zero talks with the President.
Alberto Fernandez returned to the country that morning after an international tour of China and Russia but -although he set foot in his office in La Rosada, just one floor above Wado’s- he had no communication or saw his minister, unlike CFK with whom he had a telephone conversation. Symptomatic of how that relationship turned out after Peter’s He presented his resignation, the first of all, in the week of the post PASO institutional crisis. And that De Pedro has been doing good lyrics to recover positions.
It is that Wado insisted hard and evenly on “Maxi”, his friend, with whom he armed The Campora a decade and a half ago, so that he would not leave his position as head of the block in Deputies. Orphan of father and mother, this man sees Cristina as a maternal reference and Máximo as a sort of brother who gave him politics. He is one of the few who, from that place, can tell you what he thinks.
That Monday the 31st, CFK’s son he still hadn’t spoken to the President. De Pedro wanted to convince him to change his mind: he assured him that this move was a political miscalculation, that it could be seen as taking his feet off the plate and that, in the long term, it was not going to work. In addition, he told her that he did not understand what the alternative path that Máximo proposed was. You know how the story ended. “If I spent years putting this together, how am I not going to be the first to try to take care of it”, is a reflection that the minister usually repeats.
And it is true that the Front of All is a creation, to a great extent, of De Pedro’s ant work. From 2017 onwards, he was in charge of rebuilding the relations of Christianity with the rest of Peronism. If CFK was the one that agreed to anoint a candidate that was not its own, if Máximo was the one that managed to establish a close bond with Massa -which in fact began, at the end of 2016, in a meeting between the three who first organized Wado in his office of then deputy and then it began to be sealed at a meal in his field in Mercedes-, it was De Pedro who oiled a hundred relationships. One by one, how he likes it, that like Emilio Monzó claims the thread.
For other children of the disappeared, their pasts led them to take extreme positions. He made this man more pragmatic and compossive.
But from that moment things happened, and now Wado is working on the thaw. Despite the fact that De Pedro is the first to know the tenor of the comments made about him by Albertism – the same ones that firmly insisted on the President, in the crisis post PASO and then MK letter, who broke with Kirchnerism-, he is embarking on a raid of events together with the officials of that group in an attempt to show unity. He met and traveled, on several occasions, with Juan Zabaleta, Minister of Social Development on the warpath with Christianity, and also with Gabriel Katopodis, of Public Works, to which will be added a trip with Juan Luis Manzur the day after the close of this edition.
Of all the events that threatened the balance of the Front, the protagonist of this cover draws a striking conclusion. According to him, and according to his people, both the post PASO crisis and Máximo’s rudeness were, despite the occasional wounds, healthy for the Front. “Since then there is more dialogue, since then we work better, since then the unity has been reinforced. Let’s change did not have these internal differences, which are healthy, and that’s how it went,” they say about the minister, although they admit that this electroshock therapy may not be the best in the long term. Perhaps having seen the abyss of the Government so closely is what leads De Pedro to show himself today as if he were a guarantor of the stability of the ruling party.
But those who have offices 50 meters from the President do not coincide. Those who at some point established a relationship of affection with De Pedro say that at least the minister’s resignation was a gross political error. “It was a pifie of him, that he was an official with projection and that he had achieved a lot of trust with Alberto. Although perhaps he wasn’t convinced, he should have been encouraged to tell CFK that he didn’t have to resign, that that was a bad calculation. And it was her mistake too. Now her minister within the Cabinet has been reduced politically. Today Wado knows that he made a mistake, ”says an official in daily contact with Alberto.
PAST
CFK adopted De Pedro almost like a political son. Like the mother that Wado could never have. The minister’s parents were assassinated during the last military dictatorship.
“Quique was killed. For me it is tremendous, I cannot bear it, he was the most beautiful man that existed; as a couple he was sweet, affectionate, cheerful, and with Pichu he was extremely beautiful, he took care of him, bathed him, fed him and played with him all the time. Pichu heard him arrive and was already beginning to laugh.” The one who writes is Lucía Révora, Montonera official of the Information Service in the Capital, mother of the current minister. “Quique” is Enrique de Pedro, who until he was assassinated in April 1977 was also in Montoneros. AND “Pichu” is “Wado”, that shortly after his father’s death he would also be left without a mother. At the end of 1978, a commando group entered her house in Flores and riddled it with bullets. Wado was saved only because her mother covered him with her own body, in a bathtub, from the shots. Those who know him say that it was because of that traumatic event, when he was almost two years old, that the official was affected by speech dysfunction.
FUTURE
De Pedro insists that the worst is over. Although there was a time of “personal distance” with Fernández, that was left behind between the help of the passage of time and the day-to-day management. In December he held face-to-face meetings with him again, which began with one in the presidential office and which were later repeated during the debate over the failed Budget. The vote in Congress, where the governors weigh heavily with their deputies, seems to be Wado’s opportunity to add a vote for the agreement with the Fund and some points for himself. Thorny work for the minister: he is helping to unite wills to a project of which Máximo already knows what he thinks.
But those who deal with De Pedro on a daily basis see him with renewed energy.
Perhaps it is because of the four kilos that he lost at the start of the year thanks to an intermittent fasting diet, or perhaps because he is aware that they are measuring him and that he is not doing badly. According to “CB Consultora Opinion Pública”, in five provinces De Pedro has a differential of positive image in favor, and adds 32% approval in CABA and 29% in Buenos Aires. Although the consultancy is private, in the Government they say that those who follow the most attentively andThese numbers are the members of La Cámpora, who know that the minister -perhaps for the simple reason that he does not carry such a weighty surname- is his most drinkable letter.
In fact, in some conversation in confidence, Wado was honest and admitted that, if the opportunity comes, would like to be president.
Without Cristina or Máximo as options with the possibility of attracting a more moderate social sector, Wado’s name began to sound in Christianity for the next election. Knowing the verticality of that sector, if he shows himself to be a candidate, it is probably because he had the wink of his two bosses before.
The bustle of De Pedro to recompose social peace in the Front suffered some turbulence these days. A note in Clarín assured that he would go to the Ministry of Justice -he who is a lawyer and who was a Counselor of the Magistrature, a place that today his foster brother Gerónimo Ustarroz occupies, who is actually his cousin-, and the data woke up a tsunami. up to his own Maximo Kirchner he picked up the phone, perplexed and somewhat annoyed, to find out where that rumor had come from, and it was even discussed on the presidential tour. Alberto ordered the government spokeswoman, Gabriela Cerruti, to call De Pedro from across the pond, to assure him that the versions were unfounded. “These rumors have no basis. With Wado we work very well and we have affection and respect for each other, just as happens to the President”, says Cerruti for this article. Nobody in the ruling party is mistaken: Pedro is more than the Minister of the Interior, he is the representative of the majority partner of the Government inside the Cabinet. If he leaves it would be only because the Front ceased to exist as such.
But De Pedro says that the time of “small miseries” and “internal” is over. That 2022 will be the year in which the management will help put the Front back on track and placate the anger. That perhaps, now yes, it will be again “Wadito”, as Alberto Fernández called him before the crisis post PASO. Time will tell.
