Cristina Kirchner burst into the political day with a new public letter, an extensive text published on her social networks where, in addition to reiterating her criticism against the Supreme Court and Together for Change, she ratified once again that she will not compete in the 2023 elections. "I will not be a mascot of power for any candidacy," the vice president insisted.
"I'm not going to be a mascot of power for any candidacy. I have shown, like no one, to privilege the collective project over personal location, "said the former president in her text.
And in that sense, he assured that the decision he announced last December, after knowing the ruling in the Vialidad case that sentenced her to six years in prison and disqualification from holding public office, was not "hasty or product of the moment, but of a reasoned and thoughtful decision."
Cristina Kirchner's full letter
"In this year 2023, 40 years of uninterrupted democracy in our country will be celebrated. However, an important part of the citizenry does not feel represented or contained its aspirations, in a Democracy that was lost economically, degraded socially and has begun to break down politically and institutionally. With anger and disillusionment appears what I long ago called "democratic dissatisfaction."
The loss of economic democracy begins in 2016 when the government of Cambiemos, recently assumed, began a brutal new cycle of external indebtedness that would culminate with the return of the International Monetary Fund through an unusual, unprecedented and political loan, whose objective was not only to help win the elections to that "friendly government", but also allow the withdrawal in dollars of speculative investment funds.
The story that followed is the same as always with the Fund in our country: it intervenes, takes the helm of the Argentine economy, imposes its economic program and the inflationary process is triggered again without control in Argentina. Serendipity is not a political category, and it is therefore no accident that neither of the two Presidents who accepted the IMF programme retains electoral qualification. However, in politics there is causality and the determinant is the economy.
In this context of brutal indebtedness in dollars, the bimonetary nature of the Argentine economy, which adds to the already historic external restriction and the compulsion for the formation of assets in dollars abroad, inevitably places in red the current account of our country that, in the face of the shortage of dollars, always ends with uncontrolled inflation. exchange runs against the national currency, devaluation and more inflation. Thus, it is impossible for any government to reasonably manage the natural distributive bid for income and makes inflation the most phenomenal instrument for transferring resources from the whole society to the richest and most concentrated sectors of the economy that seize this extraordinary income in a framework of lax taxation. In light of the history of our country and except for very precise periods of government, nothing new under the sun.
In addition, it is unavoidable to point out the catastrophic consequences of the pandemic not only in health and social but also in economic terms, with the deepening concentration of income and the growth of poverty. We did not come out of the pandemic any better.
For those who continue to repeat that monetary is the only cause of inflation, and still retain some critical spirit of research, I invite you to see the graphs on the evolution of the Monetary Base at constant prices and as a percentage of GDP, published by the Central Bank every month.
Once economic democracy is over, social democracy and the Peronist paradigm of upward social mobility are degraded. For the first time in Argentina we observe how a low unemployment rate (6.3%) coexists with a high level of poverty (40%). In this way, we find workers in a relationship of dependency who are poor and the emergence of a dual society, where one part accesses all goods and services and the other, the majority, sees its possibilities of progress significantly reduced or, directly, lacks them.
In these 40 years of uninterrupted democracy we have also gone through two extremely serious economic and social crises: in 1989 with hyperinflation and in 2001 with the fall of convertibility. The latter, in addition, included an institutional crisis in which 5 Presidents succeeded each other in a week, which was resolved within the framework of the National Constitution. However, at none of these times was the Democratic Pact plebiscited in October 1983 questioned, by which neither political violence against the adversary nor electoral prohibition would be elements of political action.
Today, the ghosts of the past have returned to Argentina's political reality. During the year 2022 we saw how the verbal and symbolic violence that, for years had been implanted in society by the hegemonic media, materialized in the street through the actions of violent groups that attacked, insulted and threatened death with mortuary bags, guillotines, torches, stones and escraches. The objective of these groups was absolutely directed. It was not against all political parties or all leaders, as in the crisis of 2001. It was against Peronism or Kirchnerism, as you like.
The culmination of this action took place on September 1, 2022, in front of my private home when, accompanied by God and the Virgin and surrounded by companions, they made an attempt on my life. Strikingly, after the frustrated assassination, those groups that organized and weekly lashed out, scrutinized and threatened, disappeared as if by magic. This confirms without a doubt, the premeditated and devoid of any semblance of spontaneity of the political violence of these groups. They were fueled and financed by the opposition, and the hegemonic media guaranteed them extensive media coverage.
"The bullet that did not come out and the ruling that will come out" was the headline of the newspaper Clarín, by Héctor Magnetto, the main source of dissemination of hatred towards me and my family; in a kind of lament for the failure of the murder, but anticipating the ruling that a few days later exponents of the Judicial Party would dictate against me and whose condemnatory result I publicly announced three years before when the trial known as the public work of National Roads began. The conviction and disqualification in this case has a single political and electoral translation: the proscription.
As I have been arguing for a long time, it is not just about the proscription of a person, but about Peronism. Although some, out of pettiness or mediocrity, denied it by resorting to legal technicalities, reality once again confirmed it.
Last week, after an electorally adverse weekend for Together for Change and objectively favorable for Peronism, the Court suspended the gubernatorial elections in the provinces of Tucumán and San Juan, just 72 hours before the beginning of the electoral ban and with a clear political objective: to harm Peronism and cover up its own crimes. On the same day and at the same time that they issued this ruling, the Impeachment Commission of the Chamber of Deputies of the Nation was denouncing both the scandal of the social work of the Judicial Branch that involves one of the members of this Court, as well as the illicit enrichment of its President. Each and every one of these facts I mentioned on July 18, 2022 in the document "From the exemplary court to the court of the four: brief chronicle of decadence".
It is that when I spoke of proscription in December 2022, it was not in the exercise of divinatory arts, but with the understanding of the historical stage we are going through. Just as three people did it with the provinces of Tucumán and San Juan, have no doubt that they will do it against me in order to prevent Peronism from participating in the democratic process, or weakening it, leading us to a dead end.
I already said it on December 6, 2022. I will not be a mascot of power for any candidacy. I have shown, like no one else, to privilege the collective project over personal location. I am not going to enter into the perverse game that they impose on us with a democratic façade so that those same judges, perched today in the Court, issue a ruling disqualifying me or directly removing any candidacy that I may hold, to leave Peronism in absolute fragility and weakness in the face of the electoral contest. Recent events have proved me right.
It was not a hasty decision or a product of the moment, but a reasoned and thoughtful decision. I know them, I know how they think, how they act and how they are going to act. I have seen them throughout history and experienced their game in my own flesh and that of my family, with a persecution tied with surgical precision to the electoral calendar.
Since 2016 the Judicial Party functions as a Task Force of Together for Change and the economic groups concentrated to produce the elimination of their political adversaries. They provoke us from this façade of justice and mutilated democracy and want us to fall into the terrain they want: violence and intolerance. They treat us as enemies and use phrases like "eliminate us" or "end Kirchnerism." We are not that and we firmly believe that in Democracy there are adversaries, not enemies.
We must be smart to get out of this labyrinth and break the trap to which they want to take us: that we have a candidacy prohibited by the Judicial Party. Because, in the face of a right whose only proposal is to snatch rights, Peronism continues to be the political space that guarantees the defense of the interests of the people and the Nation.
Faced with this situation, it is essential – more than ever – to build a government program that will make Argentines fall in love again, and convince them that a better country is not only possible but also desirable. A government program that is necessary not only for Peronism, but for the democratic system as a whole.
And as for those who demand the disappearance of Peronism or Kirchnerism -like a caricature of the "final solution" for Argentina-, after 40 years of Democracy I recommend you pay attention to history and the long list of "vernacular exterminators" who could never convince Argentines that eating well and four times a day is an ideological issue; that having a decent place to live and watch your children grow up, study and progress is populist; or that decent work and wages is an ancient belief. To them I say: they could not and will not end the memory or dreams of millions of Argentines to live in a free nation, whose people progress in order and are happy.
I embrace you all from the heart, as always."
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