Lucia Salinas
08/16/2021 5:47 PM
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 08/16/2021 5:47 PM
In February 2019, Víctor Manzanares declared for more than six hours as repentant in the cause of the bribery notebooks. The former Kirchner family accountant was then part of the program of protected witnesses and defendants, but later he moved south and decided to leave that regime. He is guarded 24 hours a day by the Gendarmerie, and despite being in Río Gallegos, he can
not find a job and had to close his accounting study.
With no expectation that this year will begin, he awaits the beginning of the trial he shares with Cristina Kirchner and her children.
The two-story house, located diagonally to the Rio Gallegos waterfront, does not go unnoticed.
It is easily known and identified because a National Gendarmerie van is stationed in front of the door throughout the day.
The federal force is responsible for the custody of Manzanares, after his lawyer Roberto Herrera denounced that the Federal Police, far from protecting him, "spied on him."
As a kind of symbol of what marked his professional career,
his home is located a few blocks from Cristina Kirchner's chalet
, whose purchase was one of the many operations that he reported in each affidavit and in the documentation of the companies that are under judicial investigation for
money laundering.
His life as a defendant collaborator is not easy.
Even so, he is sure of the step he took in February 2019, when before the prosecutor Carlos Stornelli declared as repentant in the section of the Cuadernos case, that he dealt with the
money laundering maneuvers headed by Daniel Muñoz
, former private secretary of Nestor Kirchner.
In his confession he spoke of the wealth of the Kirchners, of
their hotel businesses, of how they made their fortune grow, of the money laundering operations
that he carried out together with Muñoz,
responsible for transferring money - the investigation maintains - that came from bribes.
After obtaining his freedom, Manzanares asked to enter the program for the protection of witnesses and defendants that depends on the Ministry of Justice, but in May 2019 he withdrew from it because he
wanted to return to Santa Cruz
to live with his family.
The program did not offer him coverage there, and he chose to maintain permanent custody.
His stay in Río Gallegos - where he is from and where the link with the Kirchner family began - took a radical turn.
His accounting study on Alcorta Street, where he kept the sworn statements of the former presidents and that when the federal police raided they found the detail of the almost six million dollars that Florencia Kirchner had,
closed definitively.
It was an old house, in the Patagonian style that was remodeled and used for decades as the Manzanares studio. It was there that he was detained by order of judge Claudio Bonadio in July 2017. "There was only some furniture left and it accumulated humidity, the place was deteriorated," they told
Clarín
from their surroundings. Manzanares removed the last things that remained in that office and closed its doors forever.
Although he shows good spirits, and whole, from time to time the accountant states that the Law of the Repentant is not a guarantee of anything: he
sees that the cause of the Notebooks does not advance
, that despite his contribution he considers that
the cause may end in a judicial limbo.
Still, he maintains that
having confessed gave him the "peace and quiet"
he needed.
Of that, he does not regret it.
But the costs were high.
Víctor Manzanares, who all his life worked as an accountant, has not found work again since he returned to the capital of Santa Cruz.
At the beginning he collaborated with his father-in-law, for whom he carried out the accounting work in a field.
But that only lasted a while.
Meanwhile, Cristina's former accountant continues with another plan: to
study history
, something that he considers to be an outstanding debt for him and
does not rule out that it ends up being a new job opportunity.
Responsible for signing the affidavits of the former presidents and those of their children before the AFIP year after year,
Manzanares also restricted his social life
.
It comes out less and less and is seen sporadically in a few stores, an isolation that deepened with the 2020 quarantine.
Her great occupation in this new stage is
taking care of her children and accompanying them in as many activities as possible
.