#Argentinian #Kirchner #offensive #transplant #procedure
Argentina’s Vice President Cristina Kirchner on Tuesday launched a lengthy and politically charged defense against corruption allegations for which prosecutors have demanded that she face 12 years in prison and a life ban from politics.
Kirchner, 69, is accused of fraudulently awarding public works contracts in her Patagonian stronghold.
She said in a live social media broadcast on Tuesday that her political ideology, Peronism, is on trial and that prosecutors have already “written the verdict.”
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, that they said was proven,” said Kirchner, an attorney by profession who served as president from 2007 to 2015, succeeding her late husband Nestor.
During these three presidential terms, the alleged transplant took place.
“It’s not a trial against me, it’s a trial against Peronism, against the national and people’s governments,” she said, brandishing excerpts of laws, press articles, emails and accounts during her hour-and-a-half speech.
“It’s 12 years (required prison time), the 12 years of the best government Argentina has had in decades.”
Kirchner was speaking from her office in the Senate, where she is President and for which she enjoys parliamentary immunity.
Even if convicted – the verdict is expected by the end of the year – she would not go to jail unless her verdict is upheld by the country’s Supreme Court or she loses her Senate seat in the next election in late 2023.
Another dozen people are on trial alongside the vice president and their court hearings are due in recent weeks.
Kirchner has decided to defend herself on social media after her request for additional testimony was denied on Monday.
Several hundred supporters cheered her arrival in the Senate on Tuesday, while others did the same as she left her home in an upscale Buenos Aires neighborhood.
Such is her divisive nature that rival groups of protesters, both for and against her, rallied outside her home Monday night after prosecutor Diego Luciani requested that she be sentenced to 12 years in prison and banned from politics for life.
The police had to intervene as tensions rose.
Luciani lashed out at “an authentic system of institutional corruption” which he said was “probably the biggest corruption operation the country has ever seen”.
On Tuesday, other former presidents of the South American left, Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, expressed their support for Kirchner.
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