MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Espionage charges filed against former Argentine President

“No evil lasts a hundred years,” Macri underlined

Argentine Federal Prosecutor Franco Picardi requested the indictment of former President Mauricio Macri for the alleged crime of espionage, it was reported Tuesday in Buenos Aires.

The conservative former head of state is said to have encouraged the Federal Intelligence Agency to spy on current Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK), his own sister Florencia Macri and reporter Hugo Alconada Mon, among other victims, under a “systematic plan.”

Picardi is in charge of the investigation regarding the espionage against CFK in 2018 while she was a senator and at the headquarters of the Instituto Patria, which she founded and directs.

In addition to Macri, Gustavo Arribas and Silvia Majdalani, who headed the AFI during the 2015-2019 JxC administration were also charged.

Picardi submitted to Judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi an extensive opinion, over 200 pages long, in which he outlines the intelligence agency's “systematic plans” ordered by the chief executive at that time.

“The maneuvers revealed, in this case, have not been exceptional or isolated; rather, they integrate a set of many other criminal cases -several of which are filed before the Court in charge of it for reasons of connection- whose objects are limited to the investigation of intelligence actions deployed” by the AFI in the Macrista years, explained the prosecutor.

“What they have in common, a priori, is the suspicion of intervention of the highest authorities of the Agency, in the framework of the planning, coordination, and execution of tasks prohibited by Law 25.520, with points of contact that refer to the victims or targets of such illegal intelligence actions,” he added.

These circumstances amounted to the “illegal use of intelligence tools as part of systematic plans orchestrated from the state apparatus itself” and it is therefore “necessary to inquire about the role played in the aforementioned organized scheme by the immediate superior of the accused Arribas and Majdalani, the then President of the Nation, engineer Mauricio Macri,” Picardi went on while recommending other high-ranking officials during the Macrist administration be investigated.

Meanwhile, almost unaware of all this, Macri insisted Tuesday during a Climate Change forum in Buenos Aires that next year will mark the end of populism in Argentina. “Next year populism will be over in Argentina for several decades” as a result of Juntos por el Cambio's (JxC - Together for Change) victory in the presidential elections, which he takes for granted.

Also taking part in the forum were former Presidents Sebastián Piñera of Chile and Álvaro Uribe of Colombia as well as former Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.

“No evil lasts a hundred years,” Macri underlined.