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Argentina's Cristina Kirchner's prison sentence is of high political impact

Kirchner says she is innocent and characterizes her plight as “political persecution"

ARGENTINA-TRIAL/KIRCHNER A supporter places a flag depicting Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner outside the Comodoro Py courthouse before Cristina Fernandez's trial in a corruption case, in Buenos Aires, Argentina | Reuters

One of the icons of Latin America’s pink wave, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina’s current vice-president and former president was sentenced on Tuesday to six years in prison, convicted of corruption stemming from her years as president.

Found guilty of defrauding the government by awarding government contracts totalling over USD 1 billion to a family friend, Kirchner was accused of having led an organisation that awarded 51 public road works projects in exchange for bribes from construction entrepreneur Lázaro Báez, already sentenced in 2021 to 12 years for a money laundering conviction. The six years given to Kirchner represent half the potential sentence.

The sentence can be applied when all judicial appeals have been exhausted.

It is a development that piles on top of the grave economic crisis faced by the government of Argentine President Alberto Fernandez sieged by spiralling inflation, vanishing purchasing power, increased homelessness, poverty in the 43 percentiles, and a deteriorating economic outlook. But it may also be a positive development for the country’s functioning and the market, say economists.

Kirchner was Argentina’s first lady as the wife of larger-than-life Peronist president Nestor Kirchner, whom she succeeded as President of Argentina for two terms from 2007 to 2015. A populist like her husband, she had one of the highest international profiles of the members of the "pink tide", a consolidating group of left-wing leaders across many Latin American countries in the 2000s.

In 2019, in the wake of four years of centre-right government by Mauricio Macri, the first non-Peronist nor radical president elected since 1916, Kirchner announced she would seek to create a broader Peronist alliance and so would run for vice-president as the running mate of Alberto Fernandez.

The pair were elected, but soon it became clear that Kirchner held substantial political power and was essential in the Fernandez presidency. She has wielded that power at times in conflict with Fernandez leading to mass resignations of cabinet ministers representing the vice president. That led to what many referred to as “paralysis” in the Argentine government.

Since then, Kirchner and Fernandez have been trying to smooth out differences, with Kirchner preferring to characterize their situation as “disagreements about policy” and not a political fight. The Kirchner wing of the party has disagreed with the steps on the economy taken by Fernandez.

Fernandez, for his part, was quick to come to Kirchner’s side after she survived an assassination attempt earlier this year and as the sentencing neared, calling for an investigation about the prosecution of the vice-president, protesting in several tweets before and after the sentencing.

“Today, in Argentina, an innocent person has been sentenced. Someone whom the powers that be tried to stigmatize through the media and persecuted through complacent judges who ride around in private jets and luxury mansions on weekends,” tweeted Fernandez, alluding to what he characterized as a political junket in which the prosecutors are said to have participated, at the expense of a media company.

Kirchner claims she is innocent and characterizes her plight as “political persecution.”

Another former president part of the subcontinent’s pink tide, Evo Morales of Bolivia reinforced that idea in a tweet the day of her sentencing, “Our support for our sister... [Cristina Kirchner] that after surviving an attempt on her life, she faces a political trial plotted by the right with the complicity of some corrupt operators of justice.”

Compounding the argument into a regional issue, Morales later tweeted, “This so-called "hybrid war" is being carried out in Latin America with the use of the media and political operators of justice to persecute, accuse and oust leaders who defend the people and face neoliberal hunger policies of the capitalist right.”

To some, these comments are full of irony, since neither Morales nor Fernandez have bothered to speak about the fate of the former provisional Bolivian president Jeanine Áñez, serving a 10-year sentence in La Paz under a government of Morales’s party.

Despite being sentenced, however, Kirchner, a sitting vice-president and president of the Argentinian senate, was not taken to prison as she enjoys legislative immunity and congress will have to take up her case, remove her from office and strip her political privileges once she has gone through the appeals process.

There are two other cases of money laundering involving the same partner in which Kirchner and her children are accused of pretending to rent properties and hotel rooms which were never occupied. The pretense, say authorities, allowed her to make what seemed to be deposits from legitimate sources but were actually bribes from businessmen friends like Lázaro Báez and Cristóbal López. Those cases have to still come to trial.

Though Kirchner’s woes pile onto the troubles and stability of the Fernandez government with the potential of social conflict, debate exists as to whether it will have any effect on the country’s faltering economy in the manner that Brazil’s “Operation Lava Jato” in 2014 affected harshly the Brazilian economy.

Argentine economist Federico Moll told the daily La Nacion that the development could remove some of the conflicts in economic decision-making. "It maintains a certain sector of the Government, a sector that is opposed to the measures that are being taken, with the focus on another issue, on the trial of Cristina and, on that point, it is something positive for the market."

Complaining of a “deep state” and a “judicial mafia” Kirshner said after in an hourlong pronouncement after her sentencing, "They condemn me because they condemn a model of economic development and recognition of the rights of the people. That's why they condemn me."

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