Kirschner's Revenge

ARGENTINA

Kirschner’s Revenge

A recent police raid on former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s properties is a reminder that criminal investigations have become weapons in the battle for the hearts and souls of nations throughout South America.

As the BBC explained, the raid stemmed from the discovery of notebooks kept by a driver who claimed he regularly drove public officials carrying bags of cash to Fernández de Kirchner and her late husband, former President Néstor Kirchner. Prosecutors allege the Kirchners illegally received around $160 million.

Fernández de Kirchner, now a left-wing Peronist senator, denied the allegations, saying President Mauricio Macri, a conservative whom the New York Times described as her “longtime political nemesis,” was using the courts against her.

“If there was one thing missing to install political persecution and the use of the judicial authorities as an instrument of political persecution in Argentina, it was this case,” she said.

She and other leftist voices in the region – like TeleSur, a television network funded primarily by the socialist government of Venezuela – compared her plight to the proceedings used against left-wing politicians Dilma Rousseff and Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva in Brazil and Rafael Correa in Ecuador.

Brazilian lawmakers removed Rousseff from office in 2016 for allegedly misappropriating public funds, charges the Intercept argued were laughable given the depth of corruption in Brazilian politics.

“By removing Dilma, they knowingly empowered actual criminals and gangsters, people whose thieving and mobster behavior make Dilma’s budgetary tricks look like jaywalking,” wrote the website.

Lula is serving a 12-year sentence for graft but still running his Workers’ Party in the run-up to Brazil’s general elections this fall from his prison cell. He’s among the most popular candidates for president, Reuters reported. Rousseff is running for a seat in the Brazilian senate, too.

An Ecuadorean court has ordered the arrest of Correa, who was president of that country from 2007 to 2017, on charges of being involved in kidnapping an opponent. He now lives in Belgium and denies the allegations.

Fernández de Kirchner, Rousseff, Lula and Correa are all leftists whose policies strove to redistribute wealth downward, an appealing platform among the impoverished that irked representatives of the countries’ business interests.

It’s unclear if the four former leaders are guilty of corrupt practices.

But their policies have caused problems.

Argentine President Macri is now struggling to impose the austerity measures that are part of a $50 billion International Monetary Fund loan that he said was necessary to reorganize the government’s finances amid punishing inflation and a plunge in the local currency, the Financial Times wrote.

Some of the blame for Argentina’s current troubles certainly lies with previous administrations, Foreign Policy argued.

Fernández de Kirchner might go to jail someday. But it seems she has already wrought her revenge.