Here at Useful Stooges we’ve spent a lot of time covering the misadventures of former Argentinian president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
We’ve examined economist Joseph Stiglitz’s intimate (and profitable) relationship with the Kirchner clan. We’ve pondered hedge funder Kyle Bass’s foolish championing of Cristina’s disastrous economic polities. Then there’s Wall Street hotshot Georges Ugeux, who blamed Argentina’s fiscal problems not on Kirchner corruption but on the country’s sovereign-debt creditors. And economist Mark Weisbrot, who looked at an Argentina headed for financial disaster and proclaimed that it was doing “remarkably well.”
We met Kirchner crony José Francisco López, who was turned in to the cops by a bunch of nuns who caught him trying to throw plastic bags stuffed with crookedly acquired cash over their convent wall.
On December 17, 2015, we congratulated Argentina on electing as its new president the candidate who was not Cristina’s chosen successor. And on December 31, 2016, we celebrated New Year’s Eve by noting that a federal judge, Julian Ercolini, had ordered Cristina put on trial for corruption, along with her former Planning Minister, Julio de Vido, and her former state secretary for public buildings, the above-named José Francisco López.
That was the last time we checked in with Cristina. Since then, the former President has been a full-time professional defendant. On March 23 of this year, another judge, Claudio Bonadino, also ordered her to stand trial, this time for instructing her country’s central bank “to sell dollar futures at artificially low prices, causing Argentina to lose hundreds of millions. Also indicted was her former Economy Minister, Axel Kicillof. In April she racked up her fourth criminal charge, this one for engaging in real-estate transactions for the purpose of money laundering. On that occasion her passport was confiscated, and her two children, Florencia and Maximo, were also indicted.
In June, in a desperate effort to acquire immunity from prosecution, she filed to run for Senate as the candidate of a new party she had founded just for that purpose. In the August elections, despite her massive corruption record, she actually won. At an October inquiry, Cristina “defended a secret pact negotiated by her government with the Iranian regime in 2011. And in November, her former VP, Amado Boudou, was arrested on charges of embezzlement and illicit association.
Now, despite her senatorial immunity, it may soon be Cristina’s turn to sample prison food. On December 7, Judge Bonadino asked the Senate to waive her immunity and allow her to be arrested and tried on charges of treason. The specific crime: covering up Iran’s role in the fatal 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires. We’ll see what happens. Non-fans of the Kirchner clan may again have reason to celebrate on New Year’s Eve.