Claudio Savoia
03/04/2021 14:08
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 03/04/2021 2:08 PM
There were no surprises.
While her anger and her emphasis were growing along with the evolution of her speech, this Thursday Cristina Kirchner repeated the line of argument that she has been holding and that now flooded the preaching of the entire government: the judicial power of the Nation is little less than
a great The lodge conspired to persecute Kirchner officials -
whether or not they are in power - and the cause of alleged irregularities with the sale of the future dollar in 2015 are an excellent example of that witch hunt,
by making a sovereign political decision a crime.
Sown by the usual digressions, chicanes and personal attacks against judges and opponents, it was difficult to get to the bone of the thesis through which the vice president tried to convince the judges of Chamber I of the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation that it is not worth It is worth giving the green light to the Federal Oral Court 1 to start the trial hearings for alleged irregularities in the sale of future dollars from October 30, 2015 until December 9, Cristina's last day at the Casa Rosada.
However, underneath all that political rubbish, that argument could be found: the sale of dollars through future contracts - in which the sale of greenbacks that will be delivered later - is specified today - is an attribution of the authorities, and
It cannot be prosecuted or assimilated with any crime
, whatever the economic result of those decisions.
A reasoning that
could fit perfectly
with the promised official complaint
- and the one that is already under investigation, which Alberto Fernández omitted in his speech on Monday -
against Mauricio Macri and his ministers
for the multimillion dollar loan agreed with the International Monetary Fund in 2018.
It is not a question here of evaluating the relevance or not of both policies, nor the legal quality of the criminal complaints against them, formulated by both leaders of Macrismo - regarding the future dollar - and Kirchnerism, to investigate whether there was fraud in the law. taking credit with the IMF.
The magnifying glass is placed
on the similarity of all those actions, only with the inverted protagonists
depending on the circumstance.
Although it sounds obvious to mention it, the courts should only intervene in situations typified in the National Penal Code, which if they were committed by national officials will remain under the gaze of federal justice.
Any conduct that cannot be clearly reflected by one or more of the articles of the Code
should be ignored by the judges and prosecutors
, to remain only under citizen observation of the political acts of their representatives.
This is the heart of the Future Dollar case, and also of the Fund's giant loan:
in both cases, the country had - and must - face onerous payments made by its last two governments
to safeguard the precarious economic stability in which they had remained.
Is that cost automatically assimilable with a crime?
In the case against Cristina, Axel Kicillof, Alejandro Vanoli and other former officials, it was analyzed whether the Central Bank's charter -which is a law- had been violated with the order of the president and her Minister of Economy to sell millions of dollars
at the
fanciful official price of October 2015 -10.65 pesos
- but which would be effectively liquidated the following year, when the almost unanimous local and international consensus
considered a devaluation inevitable.
In fact, at the same time that the 10-peso contracts were being negotiated, the dollar was already priced and sold at 15 pesos in the "illegal" markets, as Kirchnerism liked to describe.
This happened everywhere, because with a strong exchange rate hold, that official price only existed for a few specific operations.
Justice then considered that the public coffers were being fraudulently harmed, that is,
knowing that dollars were being "given away" at a vile price
that would necessarily be sincere by the next government.
From Kirchnerism, on the other hand, they affirm that
the devaluation was voluntary and that this was the true malicious act
against the national patrimony.
If the price of the currency had been maintained as the Central Bank announced on its posters - and only there, on the posters - there would have been no damage whatsoever.
We go to the other side of the mirror: the former macrista officials partially resemble their argument to that of Cristina when they try to explain the reasons for the loan with the Monetary Fund.
They say that
the accumulated public debt was unmanageable
when they came to power in 2016, that it could be managed with "gradualism" thanks to loans with the markets that were later cut off suddenly, and that is why the political decision was made - well, that expression - to go to the IMF to get the money necessary to renegotiate those other debts paying lower rates.
From the front, we already know the slogan: they
took on an unpayable debt compromising the future of Argentines
to benefit "their friends" and sink the country.
From politics, this rhetorical tie is another example of
the similarities between the two poles
that have been succeeding each other in power and continue to push to dominate the public agenda.
But in court that gibberish does not run.
There it will be necessary to turn the noise into some minimally identifiable melody to convince the judges that the other is guilty of horrible crimes against the Nation.
And that I am innocent of these aberrations, however so similar.
