Tougher times for politicians on the take

To the evident discomfort of politicians who remain attached to the old ways of doing things, Argentina is turning into a country in which even the most powerful among them understand that they would be well advised to respect the letter of the law. This was made unpleasantly clear when the Supreme Court told Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to hand herself over to the authorities. It told them that a distinguished politician who is still supported by millions of people, including many in high places, was no longer above the law. If she could be put in jail for crimes that were committed when she thought nobody would dare to touch her, the same thing could happen to them. Just how many have good reason to feel nervous is an open question, but they must number in the hundreds.

Until very recently, this was not the case. As far as most men and women were concerned, the unwritten rules of conduct that prevailed here and in most other Latin American countries trumped those that can be found in the legal code though, on occasion, these could be used to make life difficult for one’s enemies. There is certainly nothing new about “lawfare” – over the years, large numbers of politicians, businessmen and others have had their lives ruined by it, but with few exceptions they knew it was just part of the game they were happy to play.

Unluckily for Cristina, there was no way she could adapt to the changes taking place by covering her traces. She had spent most of her life in public view. While climbing to the very top of the country’s political hierarchy and staying there for 20 years, she left far too many hostages to fortune. However, after thriving for decades in an environment in which political heavyweights felt they were entitled to feather their own nests with stolen money, as a great many did and no doubt some are still doing, it was natural for her to feel indignant when jurists who took literally all that reactionary legal claptrap she despised began pestering her.

Not surprisingly, Cristina’s repeated attempts to persuade them that she was entitled to get away with what she had done because she still had millions of votes, got her nowhere. In their pedantic way one magistrate after another – with the three Supreme Court judges having the final say – reminded her that the law is the law, that nobody, not even a personage as eminent as a former president who was still a very influential political power-broker, was entitled to flout it, and they were there to apply it. That came as a shock; there was no way Cristina, or anyone else, could have foreseen that, as the years rolled by, in Argentina the gap would quickly narrow between the unwritten rules that most politicians had long taken for granted, and the far sterner ones that nitpicking legal experts and constitutional lawyers have always gone on about.

Nonetheless, when in office, Cristina’s awareness that, should it continue, the drift towards a greater respect for the law could end up harming her did lead to an attempt to ram through “reforms” designed to keep things the way they had always been. As has just happened in Mexico, where the left-leaning government of Claudia Scheinbaum is “democratising” the selection of judges by letting ordinary folk vote for or against aspirants, Fernández de Kirchner wanted to make the political support she enjoyed count for something. Despite her strenuous efforts – and those of the puppet president Alberto Fernández she had put in office in the expectation that, as a law professor much given to boasting about his academic credentials, he would manage to protect her against those who wanted to see her behind bars – the campaign she had set in motion failed.

Cristina began the long and eventful journey that would take her to jail (or, if those responsible for her fate are in a benevolent mood, house arrest) in 1975 when she married Néstor Kirchner, an ambitious fellow Peronist who soon made it clear that fancy ideals were for speeches and he would do whatever it would take for him to climb up the greasy political ladder in Santa Cruz Province.

In addition to taking a pragmatic approach to ideological matters, moving leftwards or rightwards whenever it suited him, Néstor had no qualms at all when it came to getting his hands on money, whether by acquiring the houses of people who were unable to keep up with their mortgage payments or, when he was in a position to do so, by siphoning off public funds into his own bank accounts. He continued to work this way after becoming president of Argentina in 2003. So great was his love of money that he was once filmed treating a safe full of banknotes like a sex toy.  

Cristina, who knew what it is like to be poor, evidently shared Néstor’s passion for hard cash, but, even if she had disapproved of it, to come clean she would have had to give up both politics and her husband. Instead, she stayed where she was and, after his premature death in 2010 when she was taking her turn in the presidency, found herself in full possession of the well-oiled machinery he had set up to loot the public sector. Could she have dismantled it? To get away with it, she would have had to admit that Néstor had been a singularly corrupt individual even by the standards prevailing at the time. She also had to think of the impact such treasonous behaviour would have on her supporters and the wider Peronist movement, where many wanted to believe the late Néstor had been a kind of secular saint. As Cristina had no desire to commit political suicide, she had little choice but to continue on as before and hope that, by accumulating enough money and power, she would manage to outrun the anti-corruption campaigners who were already snapping at her heels.

Fernández de Kirchner did not fall from grace simply because, as had been plain for many years, along with her cronies, she had grown accustomed to treating the public sector as her own private cash dispenser. Had she and her underlings governed the country better, she would probably have got away with it for long enough to retire in comfort without having to worry much about judges who refuse to distinguish between good people like herself and evildoers such as Mauricio Macri, Javier Milei and the rest of them. But by making a hash of things she let power slip through her fingers to such an extent that enough members of the Judiciary decided that the time had come for them to risk sending her to jail for her many misdeeds. 

Cristina’s supporters and allies have been doing their utmost to intimidate the judges involved in the many cases she faces, but their threats now ring hollow. Not surprisingly, the willingness of public prosecutors and judges to take on powerful people is making many politicians nervous.