"Prey or dead they want me," Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said on Tuesday after hearing her sentence for corruption.
Sentenced to six years in prison and barred for life from holding public office, the former Argentine president has denounced the political use of Justice against her in a plot that she sees as being controlled by her political rivals, the opposition media and federal judges.
Kirchner took less than half an hour to speak after reading her sentence.
"The real sentence is perpetual disqualification," she said in a message broadcast live from her office in the Senate, in which she also assured that she will not seek to be president or senator in the October 2023 elections. .
Kirchner has dedicated his ad to whom he considers one of his fiercest enemies, Héctor Magnetto, the CEO of the group that owns the
Clarín
newspaper : “I am not going to be a candidate.
This is very good news for you, Magnetto.
On December 10, 2023 [when her term in the Casa Rosada ends] I will not have privileges, I will not be vice president.
So he will be able to give the order to his henchmen of the Cassation and the Supreme Court to put me in jail ”, said the vice president.
“Pet of you, never ever.
I am not going to be a candidate for anything, neither for president, nor for senator.
My name will not be on any ballot."
The announcement came after more than an hour in which the vice president denounced being a victim of "a parallel State and a judicial mafia."
Kirchner, who governed Argentina between 2007 and 2015, has affirmed that he is a victim of
lawfare
, of a political use of Justice against him.
"It is not a sentence by the laws of the Constitution," said the vice president, who dedicated a large part of her speech to trying to link her sentence with the leak of a chat between magistrates, prosecutors, media directors and opposition politicians who in the eve stirred the reading of the verdict.
More information
Cristina Kirchner sentenced to six years in prison for corruption
The messages involved Judge Julián Ercolini, in charge of the investigation in the investigation against Cristina Kirchner;
the attorney general of the city of Buenos Aires, Juan Bautista Mahiques;
the Minister of Security of the city of Buenos Aires, Marcelo D'Alessandro;
and two directors of Grupo Clarín, among others.
In the leaked messages, they sought to hide with lies a trip to Patagonia, made in October, to the estate of English billionaire Joe Lewis.
The trip, Kirchner said, “is the confirmation of a parastatal system where the freedom of life of Argentines is decided.
The judicial family at its best.
This is the system that works under the pompous figure of the Judiciary”.
The vice president has followed the reading of her sentence from her office in Congress, which has been her political refuge throughout the trial.
From there he made his defense statement on September 23, when he linked the assassination attempt he suffered at the end of September with a conspiracy against him by the Judiciary and the opposition: "From the judicial sphere, social license is given so that anyone I can think and do anything.
After the failed attack, its militancy came out to defend it with demonstrations in the streets.
Days before, the Prosecutor's Office had requested 12 years in prison against her for embezzlement and being the head of an illegal association.
The request for condemnation led Kirchnerism to take to the streets, with vigils and demonstrations in front of the vice president's house for a week.
It was in this context that a man tried to shoot him, without the bullet coming out.
The euphoria with which she was defended then contrasts with the resignation with which the conviction has been awaited this Tuesday.
A hundred people gathered in front of the Congress building, in the center of Buenos Aires, to wait for his departure.
A similar group gathered outside the federal courthouse where the verdict was read.
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