The strange thing is that there was any message from the Vatican product of chance. It would be so much chance that it would seem like a miracle. In the middle of the electoral campaign, Bergoglio added to his staff Eugenio Zaffaroni, the favorite popularizer of Christianity in the world of law and a kind of rockstar of legal Chavismo.
Zaffaroni went from judge of the Court to advisor to Cristina. And now it will have, by decree of Bergoglio, its own status within the Church. It will circulate, wearing Vatican badges, as a member of a new body on social rights and colonialism.
He will be, in fact, an informal legal spokesman for the pope in the face of proposals from Bullrich or Milei that displease Bergoglio. Anyone can already imagine it: measures on security, the limitation of protests, privatizations or the acceleration of cases of Kirchnerist corruption, such as that of the Notebooks of the Bribes, of which Zaffaroni has said the worst things. It fits right with Rights Against the Right, the government's campaign of fear.
The June 2019 meeting of Pope Francis with Argentine judges participating in the Pan American Summit on Social Rights. To his left, Judge Roberto Gallardo.
Bergoglio allowed himself to put Roberto Gallardo, a Kirchnerist judge of the City who, unlike Zaffaroni, does not exist in the universe of Justice, in another position. And he will chair a committee of judges in Rome! There, the Pope lowered the price to Zaffaroni. We will explain why later. Just one comment: Bergoglio always receives or rewards those who are here on one side of the rift. It must be the heavenly side.
Let's go back to Zaffaroni, judge of the dictatorship although he does not like to remember him at all and initially respected for his treatise on criminal law that brought innovative ideas and with which several generations were formed. He jumped to the justice of instruction, made a career and was promoted to chambermaid.
It began to lose seriousness when it turned to abolitionism, a bizarre theory that could be defined as follows: applying and enforcing sentences to criminals makes no sense. They say that the judge visited prisons to tell the prisoners to wait until he was on duty at the court to ask for his release.
Despite Zaffaroni's discredit, Bergoglio adds him to the select group of Argentines who accompany him and where the piquetero Grabois, recent pre-candidate for president, stands out. Bergoglio tells us: I am Zaffaroni. And it enhances Zaffaroni's discourse against lawfare, an entelechy presented as the manipulation of Justice, with the complicity of the big media, to persecute progressive leaders. Justice is not justice but a conspiracy.
Let's clarify: if anyone knows about that, and knows a lot, it is Kirchnerism. But Bergoglio thinks the same as Kirchnerism. It says this phrase that seems written by Zaffaroni to the measure of Cristina: "Lawfare, in addition to putting democracy at risk, is used to undermine emerging political processes.... It is essential to detect and neutralize these practices... in combination with parallel multimedia operations." Clearer, pour water on it.
We all know what lawfare is really for: to squeeze judges and prosecutors who try to do their job according to the laws. Zaffaroni applauded live the Pope's harangue at the Vatican. It was last April. Also, Deputy Siley, the one of the trick trial to the Court, and the judge of Cassation Figueroa, friend of Cristina and who barricaded herself in her office so that she would not retire.
There is also cloth to cut in the papal appointment of Gallardo, who directed the law career at the University of the Mothers. No comment. He is a militant judge hunting for space in the media. It has achieved this with surreal sentences, such as prohibiting dances with live or recorded music and the activity of delivery. He stopped the construction of a parking lot in Recoleta, intervened the SAME, closed La Rural, did not let the Coca Cola sign light on the Obelisk, intervened the Normal 1 and even fined Macri, his arch enemy. As if that were not enough, he promulgated a monthly subsidy to the children of the cartoneros as if he were a legislator. He was twice on the verge of impeachment. A classic: Gallardo's rulings are immediately appealed and annulled.
It is plain to see: with Zaffaroni and Gallardo, Bergoglio is not seeking to improve the Church. Nor the doctrine of the Church. He is attending only to his internal political game, which he does in the usual way.
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