01/09/2021 20:30
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 01/09/2021 8:35 PM
The sunset hides its last reflections.
The night becomes closed.
It hides the contours of the Quinta de Olivos chalet.
A silence and loneliness reigns inside that helps you breathe with pleasure.
Until the steps of Alberto Fernández, the President, ring out.
The usual greeting arrives, very cordial.
The first foreseeable reference also arrives.
His dislike for what this journalist is used to saying.
The obsession for every semicolon that
Clarín
publishes
.
Crowned with some memorable phrase: “
The other day they put me on Russian vaccines…
.”.
As if the diary was intended for him.
The President was always a reader of
Clarín
.
When he was a politician on the plain.
When he came to power with Néstor Kirchner.
Also now that he returned to the top of the hand of Cristina Fernández.
His mania for what is published or omitted seems to have been on the rise.
Perhaps, in parallel with the reconciliation woven with Kirchnerism.
Any mention of the vice president is useless in this area.
The dimension of the phenomenon is further illustrated by the conduct of a disciple of Cristina, Governor Axel Kicillof.
Every day he tortures the Peronist mayors of the Conurbano with the press reports that he always leads with
Clarín
headlines
.
That landscape is the one that often transforms minor words into important ones.
Suspicious.
Senator Oscar Parrilli, just started this year, declared that it would be convenient
to think about another media law
.
Like the one that opened a scar at the end of Cristina's first term.
Alberto takes away any significance
.
A real battle for impunity is being waged at this moment in Kirchnerism.
The President does not admit it in those terms.
He even believes that promoters are a small group.
Is it so?
Amado Boudou, who with his firm sentence is still under house arrest, said he was disappointed because after the first year of government the situation of the prisoners he considers political did not change.
The same declared Hebe de Bonafini, the head of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
Former Supreme Court judge Raúl Zaffaroni proposed the issuance of a pardon by the President as a solution.
Alberto repeats what he said in his recent excursions to the media: "
I will not give any pardon
."
It would be more than their political will.
Article 36 of the Constitution - perfected in 1984 with the Law for the Defense of Democracy - establishes as an attack "against the democratic system who commits a serious fraudulent crime against the State that entails enrichment."
It also determines the disqualification for the time that the laws determine to occupy public positions or jobs ”.
For that reason, he
delisted the possibility of a pardon in a general amnesty dictated by Congress
.
A difficult road to travel, at least until after the legislative elections.
That constitutional article would apply, among several, to the convicted Boudou, Julio De Vido and Ricardo Jaime.
All charged with enrichment.
The former Secretary of Transportation even confessed it in his testimonies before the Justice.
Former picketer Milagro Sala is in a similar situation.
Although Alberto considers that, in that case, there would have been procedural anomalies.
He talks it kindly with the governor of Jujuy, the radical Gerardo Morales.
Cristina is out of the discussion for the pardon.
Because that forgiveness
in no case erase the crime committed
.
The lady, it is already known, is considered totally innocent despite the numerous causes of corruption that she carries.
The one of Vialidad, for having favored Lázaro Báez with public works, is in the stage of a slow oral trial.
There are five others awaiting their turn: Hotesur, Los Sauces (both on suspicion of money laundering), the Bribery Notebooks, the future sale of the dollar and the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran.
There is a common thread in most of those causes that the Government tries to cut.
The starting point does not look favorable.
Prosecutor Abel Córdoba requested twelve years in prison for Báez in the case of the money route K. This is the precedent crime that supports the highway, where the vice president is on trial.
Los Sauces and Hotesur depend on the resolution of this.
In these business and hotel undertakings, the returns from public works would have been washed.
The Notebooks of bribes are also attached.
But in the first two, Máximo Kirchner and Florencia, sons of the vice president, are also involved.
So two things are understood.
That it is vital for Cristina to knock down or be acquitted in the cause of Vialidad.
The second option means the development of all the judgment that the woman does not want.
The criticisms that began to rain on the Supreme Court are also understood.
It has nine requests for annulment and appeals that it does not resolve.
Enabling one of them would delay and could even remove the vice president from the process.
"
The Court has been losing quality and trust,
" says Alberto.
He did not think the same a few months ago when Kirchnerism launched the first proposals to change it or increase the number of judges.
He also seems aware of the limits: “
We have no possibility of any of that.
Congressional numbers don't help us
, ”he explains.
He adds with a sensible look: “
There are people in the FdT who dream of a revolution.
It is not my idea.
Much less with 40% of society that is not willing to vote for us
”.
Such reasoning does not mean resignation.
Elections are a key season.
Perhaps to try to implement some of the suggestions of the Advisory Board led by Carlos Beraldi, Cristina's defense attorney in corruption cases.
None of those alternatives achieved unanimity from the participants.
However, the President stops at the creation of an intermediate court that replicates, perhaps, the model of Spain: a Supreme Court and a Constitutional Court.
The latter could apply to the Supreme Court in Argentina.
It is difficult to link these variants only with the search for a better judicial functioning.
Behind is always the shadow of Cristina.
The issue will undoubtedly mark a large part of the 2021 political agenda. The vice president fought great battles to alleviate her situation.
Achieved less than desired.
It happened that six of their causes completed the investigation and were brought to trial.
They can be time consuming, as they are.
Not invalidated.
Also the tour shows weaknesses on the theory of lawfare (collusion between the government, Justice and the media) that Cristina and other Kirchnerists use to consider themselves victims of an alleged persecution.
The Ciccone case that convicted Boudou began in 2012. It unleashed a scandal that led to the resignation of the attorney, Esteban Righi, the separation of the judge, Daniel Rafecas (now nominated by Alberto for the Public Ministry) and the prosecutor Carlos Rívolo.
Los Sauces and Hotesur emerged in 2014 after a complaint from Margarita Stolbizer.
Cristina made a lawfare against herself?
The President shares that theory.
Not in all cases.
Constitutionalist Roberto Gargarella scathingly links it to a historical postulate that once knew how to be familiar to Peronism and the left.
The famous international synarchy.
That Juan Perón liked to agitate as responsible for difficult political or economic situations.
Alberto seems to shield himself as soon as his relationship with Cristina looms.
Tell anecdotes that would denote harmony between them.
It deals with dispelling doubts when the government's counter-march arises in some areas.
How to understand that from one day to the next, a 7% increase was canceled from February for prepaid medicine?
How to understand that the first resolution mentions "the critical state in which the majority of the providers are"?
How to understand that 24 hours later "the delicate context" was appealed to annul it?
Cristina had spoken days before about the need to align prices, rates and salaries at the start of the election year.
"
It was my decision
," says the President curtly.
His face shows a grimace of helplessness and disgust for the decree he issued to try to stop the growth of the Covid contagion.
Why?
The governors agreed when he proposed the measure.
Although they asked him to enact it himself.
When he was about to do so, resistance emerged.
Alberto felt that they played him badly.
Have you reflected on how much you fulfilled in 2020 on the promises to co-govern with those leaders?
As a result of an extremely difficult year, the President rescues with a positive sign the germ of an international mutation that could help Argentina.
First, the reaction of the European Union to face the post-pandemic crisis.
He says that he was in charge of maintaining fluid relations with the main countries of that bloc.
In almost parallel order would be the link with Washington.
Alberto was the first Latin American president to recognize the victory of Democrat Joe Biden.
Also, the first to repudiate the savage attack by protesters on the Capitol promoted by Donald Trump.
The change of administration opens up expectations.
Above all, with the negotiations ahead with the IMF.
When Cristina's bad relationship with Barack Obama is recalled, she replies: "I never agreed."
The government's position on Venezuela also seems an incomprehensible obstacle.
Not so incomprehensible: Kirchnerism is an exhibition of darkness.