Kirchner, to the judges who are investigating her: "This court is a firing squad"

“Last words…” Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said from her office in the Senate, her eyes fixed on the camera.

She stopped for a second, smiled, and launched the phrase that she had already thought of as the headline.

"Never a judicial term so appropriate to define what this court is: it is a firing squad."

The three federal judges were listening to her, who on December 6 will decide if she is guilty or innocent of leading an alleged illicit association set up in the Casa Rosada to defraud the State.

Prosecutors have asked Kirchner for 12 years in prison and his perpetual disqualification from holding public office.

“A government democratically elected three times is not an illegal association,” said Kirchner, referring to the management of her husband, Néstor Kirchner (2003 -2007) and the two times she was president, between 2007 and 2015.

Kirchner spoke for less than 20 minutes, far from the long speeches he was able to give in the past when he had to defend himself in court.

His first appearance was on December 2, 2019. Already on that occasion he denounced that he was the victim of a "judicial party" that already had the written sentence.

Her intention, according to the vice president, is to get her out of the political career and charge her against Peronism, the movement that she represents.

“Do you seriously believe that my government has committed fraud against the public administration?” She asked the court judges.

“My government, the one that paid the International Monetary Fund, did we defraud the country, when living conditions were much better than now?

Those who brought the IMF and indebted the country by 45,000 million, money that we do not know where it is, they have no problems, they are in Qatar watching the World Cup, ”she said,

"The sentence is written, but I never thought it would be so badly written," Kirchner shot.

And he charged once again against the two prosecutors in the case, Diego Luciani and Sergio Mola.

He accused them of lying and slandering during the 20 days that the prosecution's allegations lasted.

To reinforce the idea of ​​the firing squad, he recalled that ten days after the request for conviction against her, a man tried to assassinate her in her house.

"But the bullet did not come out," he recalled about that assassination.

“12 days after that September 1,

gives us this cover: 'The bullet that didn't come out and the failure that will come out'.

Look if there is no identification with this cause.

During the accusation, things were told that had not existed and others were hidden.

And it turns out that in the defense arguments it was shown that each of the things that had been accused by the prosecutor were not true,” said Kirchner.

To complete his defense, his lawyers uploaded to social networks a document that they titled

The die is already cast for Kirchner.

Two and a half years have passed since the beginning of the process and only the sentence remains, scheduled for December 6.

If she is finally convicted, she will not go to jail, because she has privileges as vice president.

Her eventual conviction, in any case, will start a long appeals process that will end up in the Supreme Court, which will have the last word.

Prosecutors accuse Kirchner of setting up an illegal association during his two governments, between 2007 and 2015, to benefit friends of power with million-dollar public works contracts in exchange for bribes.

Among the defendants there are officials suspected of charging and businessmen suspected of paying.

According to the argument of the prosecutor Luciani, the former president set up an oiled mechanism where the businessman Lázaro Báez, sentenced in 2021 to 12 years in prison for money laundering, was the great beneficiary of road works in the province of Santa Cruz, the political cradle of Kirchnerism in Patagonia.

Cristina Kichner says her "last words" before the judges who are investigating her for alleged corruption, on November 29, 2022 from her office in the Argentine Senate.

HANDOUT (AFP)

Luciani has said that the vice president "could not not know" what was happening under her command.

And he estimated the damage caused to the State at 1,000 million dollars through 51 road works contracts delivered to Austral Construcciones, Báez's company, until then an unknown bank employee who in a few months became a millionaire.

As arguments of the alleged fraud, the prosecution said that Báez's assets grew 12,000% between 2004 and 2015 and that of his company 46,000%.

During the three Kirchner presidencies, Báez only had the State as a client;

while his fortune multiplied, he entered into twenty private business agreements with the Kirchner family.

On August 23, one day after Luciani's request for prison, Kirchner defended himself against all the accusations.

He did it, once again, looking into a camera mounted in his office in Congress.

Kirchner denounced in that statement that the investigation he is facing is actually "against all Peronism", a "fiction" without evidence or legal support.

He placed former President Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) behind the move, representative of "those who go for everything, for wages, the rights of workers and retirees."

Peronism then closed ranks around the vice president.

There were reparation marches and long vigils in front of the apartment he occupies in Recoleta, the most affluent neighborhood in Buenos Aires.

The demonstrations stopped abruptly on the night of September 1, when they tried to kill her with a shot to the head.

The vice president then reduced her public appearances.

As promised: the Twenty Lies of the Road Cause.

https://t.co/GIaFV0GAT4

— Cristina Kirchner (@CFKArgentina) November 29, 2022

On the list of accused there are 12 other people.

There is the former Federal Planning Minister, Julio De Vido, the man who managed the public works budget.

Also Lázaro Báez and the former Secretary of Public Works José López, imprisoned since 2016 after being caught red-handed when he tried to hide bags with nine million dollars in a convent.

Kirchner maintains that the entire trial is actually political, "a firing squad that had from the beginning the objective of stigmatizing a political space and who has the highest degree of representation of that space."

“It is so that nobody ever dares to do the things that we did: recover the AFJP [the private pension system that was nationalized in 2008], recover YPF [the oil company restatized in 2012] and pay the IMF [everything owed, in 2005].

It has been a disciplinary action by the political class ”, he said this Tuesday before the judges.

Those same judges must now decide if the prosecutor has proven that the decisions of a government can be considered the result of an illegal association, which by definition is born to commit a crime.

Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS America newsletter and receive all the latest news in the region.