The shocking news that the prosecutor Marijuan released this Wednesday, at the dawn of an extra long weekend, is an excellent symbolic push for Cristina Kirchner, but much more than that: the request for dismissal of the vice president in the iconic case of corruption K – neither by far the most important nor burdensome – is above all a fundamental piece in the final blitzkrieg with which Sergio Massa seeks to be pointed by the finger of Cristina as a universal candidate for the presidency in the name of the Frente de Todos or the equivalent electoral artifact designed by the ruling party this year.
Let's start with the hard data: Marijuan was the most persevering and consistent judicial official with the investigation of the so-called K Money Route from the moment that fabulous money laundering maneuver was disclosed by Nicolás Wiñazki in the program Periodismo Para Todos, by Jorge Lanata, ten years ago.
In March of that year, remember, Cristina was still the president of 54% of the votes, as she liked to describe herself. Not even the Frente Renovador had taken shape, which that year would throw away the dream of a new re-election of Kirchner's widow. Nor had the case known as "public works" advanced in the courts, denounced in 2009 by Elisa Carrió and several of her deputies, and which only gained speed since 2016 under the name of Vialidad, concluded in December with a resounding condemnation of the now vice president and her partner Lázaro Báez.
Two other judicial cases very threatening to Cristina and crammed with evidence against her, Hotesur and Los Sauces, had not even been reported in Comodoro Py. Not to mention the most powerful of all, initiated in 2018 with the radioactive Cuadernos de las Coimas.
This review is necessary to assess the impetus that Marijuan gave to the investigation of the K Money Route, while the government stood in its way dozens of obstacles. Some were public, some were not.
Since that lukewarm April of 2013, the prosecutor charged against Báez and Cristina asking Judge Sebastián Casanello for piles of evidence measures, from their incursions with bulldozers through the Patagonian steppe to punctilious exhortations to the Swiss banks or the US justice. The contractor became more and more entangled, until the pornographic video of his son and his collaborators counting millions of dollars under the smoke of cigars and the effluvia of whiskey forced Casanello to order his arrest. It was already 2016.
Between repentants -led by the accurate confession of Leonardo Fariña-, evidence of sorted offshore circuits to take and bring fortunes from the country, and raids on gigantic rooms or garages for more than 900 vehicles,Cristina's luck was in this file.
With an undisguised personal and economic relationship with Báez, justice had to answer a key question: was the money laundered by the contractor between 2010 and 2013 Cristina's, or in truth the haste and carelessness to hide it exposed the attempt to "Mexicanize" the president? Of course, it is a discussion between tahurs. But depending on the answer that the evidence allowed to formulate, the now vice president was on one side or the other of the dock of the accused.
Let's go back then to Marijuan, in charge of promoting and interpreting that information. Until now, he had resisted and appealed Casanello's delays in the processing of the file, and accompanied the orders of the Federal Court to investigate with new measures the possible responsibility of Cristina in the manipulation of this flow of funds discovered by Wiñazki and validated by his own work.
We clarify and underline "this flow" of money, because the K Money Route was just one of many taps of alleged money laundering from the State – Báez's only source – that had as protagonists Néstor and Cristina Kirchner together with their partner as a provider of public works. In Wednesday's ruling, Marijuan repeats it at least three times.
But he found no evidence of the benefit or participation of the now vice president in Baez's raids with Fariña, Elaskar and the amateur team of launderers who worked for him after Nestor's death. Although a possible cover-up of these maneuvers could have found a foothold in justice, the prosecutor concluded – reasonably based on the evidence collected – that Cristina should not be charged in this case.
So much for legal interpretation. But the bombshell that Marijuan fired on Wednesday has a notorious and almost obligatory political reading, in which the prosecutor gives prominence to one of his closest political references: Economy Minister Sergio Massa.
Dedicated body and soul to a race against time – and sometimes against laws such as gravity – to be the only candidate of the ruling party, and taking into account the exuberance of his resources to persuade about his hypothetical influence, Massa appears as the direct beneficiary of the Marijuan resolution.
In the first place, whether it is true or not, it will not take him long to convince the vice president that he inspired the prosecutor to ask that she be dismissed. Marijuan's untimely measure, signed minutes before a long weekend and a day before the march of Kirchnerism to the Plaza de Mayo, collaborate generously with that interpretation.
But there is a deeper level in Massa's bet: to show Cristina that he can be more effective than Alberto Fernández in getting what she wants and needs most; Escape from the distressing corruption court cases that grip her and her children.
That was the cornerstone of his pact with President Fernández when he chose him as a candidate for 2019. For Mrs. Kirchner, that agreement was not fulfilled. In his all-or-nothing bet, while Wado De Pedro's shadow grows over his presidential pretensions, Massa can sell that he left a gift to Cristina for the act of the Square. It will not be the first move that the minister shakes beyond the cards he has in his hand.