Santiago Fioriti
08/01/2020 - 23:56
- Clarín.com
- Politics
-I call you to hear it from your mouth. Why don't you want to join the Commission?
Gustavo Béliz and Federico Pinedo have had a friendly relationship for more than three decades. At some point, in addition to being friendly, she knew how to be political. They were electoral partners on June 30, 1996, when the current Secretary for Strategic Affairs presented himself as a candidate for the head of the Buenos Aires Government. In that election conventional ones were also chosen to sanction the Constitution of the City. The ballots were glued. Béliz stamped her name in two, 70 and 134, with conventional candidates who adhered to her application. The 70, of New Leadership, was headed by Patricia Bullrich; 134, from Alianza de Centro, by Pinedo. Since then, Béliz and Pinedo have not lost dialogue, even in these seven and a half months of the fourth Kirchner government.
Now they were on the phone again. Beliz sounded insistent.
"It's not about loving, " Pinedo explained . I am a party man, I am going to do what the party tells me and in no case am I going to do what I do not want. But it also seems awkward to me that they have not invited the radicals if they really want to improve Justice. They have a long history on these issues.
The official's call was one of the latest in a series of pressures that the Casa Rosada exerted underground on Macrismo before closing the list of jurists and lawyers who would form the Advisory Commission days later. That Commission will be in charge of giving tools to the ruling party to expand the Supreme Court, change the functioning of the Judicial Council, the work of the Public Prosecutor's Office and to implement more jury trials.
Alberto Fernández sought to avoid the orphanhood of opponents. "They are going to say that it is Cristina's Commission, something must be done , " they had slipped into their environment when the initiative began to take shape. A similar feeling seized that same circle when he learned that only Elena Highton de Nolasco would go as a representative of the Court to the announcement of the Judicial Reform project. In the Olivos Residence there were moments of anger and reproach. The other judges of the highest court had transmitted, with childish excuses, their decision not to attend. They were annoying. They felt betrayed by what they had interpreted during the campaign as an untouchable promise: that the increase in membership was not going to be considered.
At the same time it was a matter of form. An adviser to one of the judges recalled days ago the first meeting with Marcela Losardo, already Minister of Justice: "He came with a message from the President. He told the five judges that they were going to find out about all the judicial news . " The promise not to find out through the media would not have been fulfilled either. It was a criticism of Macri and his Minister of Justice, Germán Garavano. Today they formulate it to Fernández and Losardo.
The dialogue with the opposition did not prosper either, in part, because Alberto wanted to impose the name of the opposition adviser, the conditions and the times. His first bet was a call to Horacio Rodríguez Larreta. The president told him that he wanted a Commission chair to be occupied by Pinedo. The mayor replied that he did not depend on him. The dialogue was gentle. When Fernández told him that he wanted to incorporate Inés Weinberg de Roca to the Commission, Larreta passed the contact on to him.
Alberto called after a while and invited her to join. Weinberg de Roca, who had been Mauricio Macri's candidate for the Office of the Attorney General of the Nation and had to remain with the desire for the parliamentary resistance of the PJ, accepted with pleasure. In the macrismo the rumor later spread that, when the subject was made public and the first saucepans sounded, the judge of the Superior Court of Justice of the City would have considered resigning. False . She didn't even evaluate it.
Rodríguez Larreta called Pinedo. " The President conveyed to me that it would be good for you to be on the Commission," he said. Pinedo replied that he was willing to accept only if the three legs of the coalition supported him, although without hiding his disbelief at the participation of Carlos Beraldi, Cristina's lawyer. "They call me and they put it on Beraldi, isn't that a provocation?" , he asked himself.
Pinedo, who is currently without public office after 16 consecutive years in Congress, believed that he lived a déjà vu . In 2014 he had participated in the drafting of the draft reform of the Penal Code that promoted Kirchnerism. The former senator always defended the reform, but he had to deal with a lot of criticism. " The Zaffaroni and Pinedo Code," laughed at the time, when Sergio Massa was still driving the middle avenue. In part, it was true. Zaffaroni had participated in the writing along with another specialist who is currently part of the Advisory Commission, León Carlos Arslanian.
Larreta did not delay in chatting with Patricia Bullrich to see what he thought of the proposal. "They are going to tell us that we turned ourselves in, but I don't want to decide it myself. Let's zoom in, " asked the PRO president. From there, there were cross conversations between the main references of the anti-K arc. Mauricio Macri spoke to Elisa Carrió before he traveled to France. The former president, contrary to what might be supposed, would have winked for Pinedo to be part of the debate. For that, perhaps, that you always have to sit down to dialogue.
Carrió put the scream in the sky. " Neither accomplices nor bleach ", in the words of Paula Olivetto, deputy and one of the exegetes of the leader of the Civic Coalition. María Eugenia Vidal and Martín Lousteau also viewed him with bad eyes. From the radical point of view, the deputy Mario Negri stated that the Government wanted to mount a reality that society questions, the malfunctioning of Justice, to save the vice president. He said it with humor: "It is like going to visit a patient who is in intensive care and, to get him excited, you bring him a bicycle as a gift."
When Together for Change set a date for the Zoom, a new message came from Olivos, private and as an ultimatum: "The proposal is not for the party, it is personal and it is for Pinedo. And we don't have much time, they have to answer now for yes or no " . While the deliberations were taking place and there was a date and time for the Zoom, Rodríguez Larreta's cell phone rang again. It was not Alberto, but he was one of his main collaborators. "The President says he is done, forget about Pinedo . "
An important radical leader, who hours earlier had fantasized among his intimates about the possibility of obtaining a place in the Commission, wrote in a chat group: "The trouble is not Alberto's, it is Cristina's . " The spirit that has dominated Together for Change since then was marked in that text. In other words: if the Government tried to accelerate at all costs, it had better do it alone. In this context, it is difficult for the Judicial Reform to achieve the adhesion that the Casa Rosada is still pursuing. The President, who seeks to convince everyone that this is a before and after in the judicial era, will make gestures in the next few days to seduce opponents and add them to his plan. It is unknown if they will be real gestures or to the rostrum.
