By Stella Calloni on February 3, 2020
Argentina’s Vice-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has filed two complaints, one to the regional Federal Court of her home province Santa Cruz and the other to the Federal Administration of Public Income (AFIP), denouncing the institution for undertaking a “fierce and unprecedented persecution campaign” against her under the previous administration of Mauricio Macri and his political alliance Cambiemos.
In a publication on her website before traveling to Cuba to visit her daughter who is under medical treatment, Fernandez noted that “ task forces were developed in the different agencies of the National Executive Power, such as the Federal Agency of Intelligence (AFI), the public income administration AFIP, the Financial Information Unit (UIF), and the Anti-Corruption Office, among others, specifically to attack and discredit me” since Macri took office on December 2010.
“Those who still don’t believe in the existence of lawfare, which aims to destroy political opponents through the illegal use of judicial and administrative procedures by public officials and sectors of the judiciary, are perfectly in coordination with the hegemonic media,” she commented.
In her written notices to the judiciary, she denied having committed any fiscal irregularity during 2017. For this situation, she was charged with a debt for three fiscal periods and imposed with a heavy fine; these irregularities were activated four days after she assumed her position as an elected federal Senator. This arrived even though she was never sent a notice about it during that year and it turns out there was an express order from the agency for her not to be informed.
“The dimension of the harassment I’ve been suffering for a year, which goes beyond the exclusively political issue and allows me to frame it as violence perpetrated by the State against a woman who has served and is currently serving at the highest level of the country. Certain members of the National Judicial Power have subjugated me to truly inhumane treatment, violating my right to physical and moral integrity, my right to freedom and personal safety, my right to respect of my dignity, to protect my family, my right to equal protection before the law and from the law,” Fernandez explained.
The Vice-President detailed that she was subjected by her eternal persecutor, the late Judge Carlos Bonadio, including eight inquiries in one single day. “During the morning of February 25, 2019, on the 69th birthday of my husband and father of my children: Nestor Carlos Kirchner. That was no coincidence. On July 14, 2015, the same judge raided the offices of Maximo Kirchner in the city of Rio Gallegos, on the day his son (Nestor’s grandson) Néstor Iván turned four years old. I still remember his mother’s fear that the house would be raided on the child’s birthday.”
Regarding this case, Fernandez has sent a memo to Judge Bonadio’s court “with a request to get back our family’s entire financial accounting records that was abducted on the framework of the different lawsuits being brought by the head of that court against me” She also condemned the “the several raids carried out in my son’s office as in that of our previous accountant, Victor Manzanares, who for obvious reasons had all the information and documentation, and who was deprived of his freedom on that date,” July 2017. She also explained how judges with criminal jurisdiction were entitled to raid all of our family’s associates and her husband’s estate, placing these estates in the hands of judicial auditors “who stopped paying taxes corresponding to these assets to allow AFIP not only to claim these taxes but also compensatory and punitive interests, costs and fees for its lawyers.”
All this information was concealed from her, she said, so as to impose a tax adjustment. Fernandez not only rejected these irregularities but she also warned that their execution of these orders is void because she was never notified. On top of that she noted that “to increase financial suffocation, the Executive Power also deprived me of the pension I was entitled to as former President of the Nation.”
Also while a hunger strike taking place, led by the doctor of social leader Milagro Sala and other political prisoners of the Macri government, Jorge Rachid, political leader, and writer, who was demanding the freedom of all those illegally detained under false pretenses, it was coming out that Macri’s government granted millions of dollars in funds to set up a “boutique hotel”, worth almost two million dollars, to Alejandro Vandenbroele, a repentant businessman who was key in the judicial persecution against the former vice president, Amado Boudou, whose testimony served to accuse and condemn him. He is still illegally in prison.
Several key documents, which were hidden from Boudou’s lawyers at the time, have now been revealed by the website El Destape, which shows the serious irregularities and maneuvers carried out with the so-called repentants of the Ministry of Justice and then headed by Germán Gravano, who has been denounced several times for these types of situations.
Meanwhile, the hunger strike that began this morning by Rachid and other comrades, with the support of trade unionists and politicians from various sectors, was suspended tonight after the president of the Supreme Court of Justice, Pablo Baca, who confessed that Milagro Sala was detained without cause, resigned from his position
Trade unionists, social and political organizations committed themselves to begin tomorrow a plan of struggle so that justice will comply with the immediate release of all those accused of false causes and political maneuvers.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau