Pablo Javier Blanco
01/22/2021 9:57 AM
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 01/22/2021 10:00
Cristina Kirchner's phone rings.
The name of Pablo González appears on the screen.
She answers, does not filter the call.
In politics, this symbolic capital is not small.
It opens doors, forges careers and can even get a person without a background in the oil industry to be appointed president of the most emblematic national company in the energy sector: YPF.
Pablo González is the example of this.
A trusted person of the Kirchner marriage
since the 90s, the national deputy finalizes details to sit in the most important chair of the iconic oil company.
And although his appointment, after the chronicle of an announced departure of Guillermo Nielsen, may have surprised many, in Santa Cruz the news was taken normally.
"
González is Cristina, she is one of the few who is answered by the phone,
" Santa Cruz sources agree.
This data has to do with the genesis of the unbreakable relationship that unites the brand new president of YPF with the Kirchners.
It was 1983 and in the small real estate of Gerardo “el Negro” González, on Roca Street ─now renamed Kirchner─ the phone rings.
"It's for Nestor," says the attendant and at that moment
Pablo, just 14 years old, rushes out
to the lawyer's office located half a block away to tell him that they were looking for him.
“My
father administered properties to Nestor
, he had not been mayor of Río Gallegos yet, he was a very successful lawyer and had several properties, this to demystify all the atrocities that were said about him.
Nestor had a place that didn't have a telephone half a block away, so they called the real estate agency,
I was going to tell him and he came running, skinny, tall
.
That is the first image I have of him, ”González recalled, a decade after Kirchner's death.
In that same real estate, González witnessed the moment in which Néstor Kirchner decided to jump into politics.
It was during a chat with his dad.
"Negro, I'm not going to work as a lawyer anymore," Kirchner warned.
─
And what are you going to do?
─He was questioned by the “Negro”.
"I'm going to dedicate myself to politics," he told her.
─
Stop fucking around, dedicate yourself to traveling, dedicate yourself to enjoying life
, González González's father recommended.
"Luckily he ignored him,"
González (son) jokes every time he remembers that conversation, which took place years before he left to study law in La Plata.
Pablo González (right) when he was a child, along with his father Gerardo "el Negro" González, a personal friend of Néstor Kirchner, and his sister Marcela.
In 1989, already as the leader of the Santa Cruz student center in the Buenos Aires capital, Pablo González was reunited with "Lupín", as Kirchner was called by his resemblance to a cartoon character.
Santa Cruz had stopped paying the rent for that space and
the students had been evicted
.
"We went with my father to see him, he was in a confectionery that is no more, 'Carreras', and he was the only one who gave us a hand," he said, grateful for that gesture.
If politics were compared to professional football, it could be said that Pablo González ─passionate about sports, a Boca fan, a fan of Maradona and Unión Santacruceña, a club in which he is defined as a "6 who comes out from behind playing" ─
did all K lower divisions
, always within the State.
Since he returned from studying, the province gave him charges.
This is how his resume marks it, so viral these last hours.
He started in 1993, as Legal Advisor for Public Services of the State Society.
A year later he had his only antecedent in the energy sector, when he was director of Distrigas Sociedad Anónima, a firm that distributes natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas in Santa Cruz, where currently
his wife, Karina, is vice president
.
In 1996 he was legal manager of Public Services Society of the State and in 1999 he entered politics fully, hand in hand with Néstor Kirchner.
The Patagonian had won his third reelection as governor and was in the campaign command with 50 people, one of them was Pablo González.
"Now we win in Santa Cruz and
we are going for the Presidency of the Nation,
" roared Kirchner, euphoric.
Those who heard him applauded and shouted reflexively, it was the custom, but at that moment, under their breath, they looked at each other in disbelief.
"He's crazy," they
whispered.
Pablo González sitting in the Rivadavía Armchair when Néstor Kirchner was President.
It is a photo that the Santa Cruz always has in his office and his WhatsApp image.
A few days later, another call marked his luck: Kirchner summoned him to his office at Government House.
He went to see it.
The then governors sat next to him and asked how old he was.
He answered that 30. "You are
already grown up, you have to take on more responsibilities,
" he told the kid that at 14 he was a telephone cadet.
"You have to be Undersecretary of Revenue of the Province," he ordered.
"But I'm a lawyer," González was surprised.
"Me too, and?" Kirchner stopped him.
The idea was to stay for a while and then go through other spaces of the K administration, but since the
collection began to rise
after his appointment, it lasted the entire term.
In those four years, González told Kirchner that he did not like to continue in taxes.
The almost family trust between the two allowed him to express it, even with some guilt because he felt a debt to Kirchner, who had helped his father, who had health and financial problems.
"I had given him a hand of friend,
he gave me more years of my father's life,
" he explained in a militant zoom a few months ago, in which he ended up crying.
"I don't like being here, but with the things that you and I know,
I jump into the river, I do whatever you tell me
," he was honest.
González says that Kirchner answered him shortly.
“You are wrong, the subject of mine and your old one is mine and your old one.
You have nothing to do with it, I am giving you an opportunity in politics that nobody gave me, I had to kick open the doors, "he cut him off.
As González himself recalled, in that reserved talk, Kirchner assured him that he
had a political project for 20 years
.
Pablo González himself is recognized as a political all-rounder, a professional, but he keeps those first years in Santa Cruz with particularity: “I went through all sectors.
Since I returned from studying, I was fortunate that the province gave me very important positions.
I always had executive positions and the one I liked the most was being Néstor Kirchner's Undersecretary of Tax Resources when he was governor, because I had the opportunity to
get
to
know him a lot, to strengthen ties with him and learn
”.
Official mutism
At the state oil company
for now there is only silence
.
Nobody wants to talk about Nielsen's departure because he did not present his formal resignation to the board, although he has already tweeted that he is leaving because President Alberto Fernández offered him a "new challenge."
Neither is there any formal talk about the landing of Pablo González because his resignation was not approved by the Chamber of Deputies.
They claim to be
doomed to the "historic debt swap",
as they define it, which is coming.
Within the framework of the versions of public knowledge about my departure from YPF, I comment that they originate in a new challenge that was offered to me by the President of the Nation.
(I open thread)
- Guillermo Nielsen (@NielsenEcon) January 20, 2021
Consulted by
Clarín
, Pablo González himself preferred not to make statements about his arrival at the company in the middle of the debt restructuring.
Thus, with a president who does not finish leaving and another who does not begin to arrive, the markets speak and YPF shares continue to fall amid what the markets interpret as an advance of Kirchnerism over the oil company.
And beyond the lack of experience in the field, González arrives at his new role with a single certainty: he has the full support of Cristina Fernández and Máximo Kirchner, head of the block of pro-government Deputies, whom he forced to isolate himself for having been "Close contact" with him when he was diagnosed with a positive Coronavirus in mid-November, forcing the head of La Cámpora to virtually close the debate on the large fortune project.
In that map, everything indicates that he will not only arrive at the oil company, but will disembark with the former provincial camper deputy
Matías Bezzi, Máximo's personal friend
, to join Santiago “Patuchito” Álvarez, one of the vice of YPF, and Santiago Carreras, members of group K in the company.
It is not a mystery what Pablo González thinks about CFK and his son.
"Cristina is our host and the inspiration of courage," he
said about the vice president in a recent interview in the Santa Cruz daily
Tiempo Sur.
"I have known Maxi since I was 14. He is the future," González says when asked about the head of La Cámpora.
On Máximo he went a little further: “I've known him since he was 14 years old.
We have all seen its evolution.
Smart.
Politician capable of navigating the great issues and also the territory.
I love Maxi very much, he is a great partner.
The future".
From State Attorney K to head of YPF
When Néstor Kirchner arrived at the Casa Rosada and many
penguins with black palates migrated
to positions of the Presidency, Pablo González had to stay in the South to occupy a key place within the official project: he was appointed
State Attorney of Santa Cruz
.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by pablo gonzalez (@ pablogonzalez8808)
Thus, tacitly, he was anointed as the trusted man of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner
to "control"
everything that happened in the province.
"Cristina put him as State Prosecutor of Santa Cruz in his first position of relevance to
control and review the complaints of corruption
in the province," the national deputy of the UCR for the City, Álvaro de Lamadrid, who lived more than a decade in province K and is the author of
The Buried Decade.
Cristina, the suitcases and the messianic plan to return
(Planeta, 2016).
De Lamadrid, one of the fiercest critics of the Kirchnerist model in Congress, indicates that, among his different public positions (he was minister of government, provincial legislator, and head of the Cabinet between 2007 and 2011), Pablo González fulfilled another function: " He was in charge of
dictating to the
Santa Cruz
newspapers and blog
, flooding their pages and portals with good advertisements and giving
epic news of Kirchnerism
and managing at Cristina's whim the funds from Santa Cruz and the discretionary and arbitrary contributions to municipalities".
In parallel, González became the representative of the Front for the Victory of Santa Cruz during the 12 years of Kirchnerism in power.
In the province, they speak of him as
the last provincial "super minister" of Kirchnerism
, since he held various functions during the government of Nestor, as did Ricardo Jaime and Julio De Vido, among others.
Pablo González with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
He is loyal to the vice president but some say he is afraid of her.
That mixture of ductility and loyalty also made him land in the National Congress, first as a senator and then as a deputy.
He reached the Upper House in 2011, in the first elections after the death of Néstor Kirchner.
His nomination as senator was read within Kirchnerism as a kind of punishment, because it
put a brake on his local electoral political career
, which had grown in the eight years of presidency of the Front for Victory.
However, four years later, he was elected as
Alicia Kirchner's vice president
and returned to the province.
In 2019, with Santa Cruz plunged into a deep crisis, his name began to sound like a potential successor to the governor, whom he had replaced on countless occasions at events and institutional meetings during Macri's presidency.
But once again, his desire to compete collided with the
pen of CFK's candidacies
and he was sent to the Deputies, where he still appears today as head of the Constitutional Affairs committee until the plenary session deals with his resignation.
“Pablo González is Lázaro Báez but with more political curriculum, a
soldier of Cristina more than Kirchner
.
He is terrified of Cristina, whom he obeys without thinking.
He owes his political career to her and that is why he does what she asks of him.
Literal ”, De Lamadrid sentence, which sees in the appointment of Santa Cruz an
advance on“ the box ”
of the state oil company in the face of the campaign and to“ finance the judicial reform and the scrapping and dismantling of the judiciary ”.
A Kirchnerist deputy who has worked side by side with González for a decade does not coincide.
“He
is a person of dialogue, he is not closed at all.
Nielsen represented the financial system, it is interesting that someone who knows Patagonia, who knows where the basins are, who approaches the SMEs, assumes, ”he praises him and points out that several parliamentarians, especially from the south, welcome the appointment of a politician in charge of the firm.
Other leaders consulted by
Clarín
classify Santa Cruz as a "politician with a waistline", not a fanatic.
"Personally I choose who to have coffee with,
institutionally I have to talk to everyone,
" he sums up.
In Santa Cruz, in addition, they interpret this gesture as an eventual support to be, this time, a
candidate for governor in 2023
, since Alicia Kirchner does not have another reelection.
EP
Look also
Alicia Kirchner, YPF and a bid for US $ 1 billion in the oil business
YPF and the worst sample of politics
In YPF's worst moment, Nielsen confirmed that he is leaving: he will be replaced by a man appointed by Cristina Kirchner
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