MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Incarceration is a “dignity certificate,” CFK claims

“I will be in jail, but the people will be worse every day,” CFK warned

Former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) said her likely imprisonment, to be probably ruled upon Tuesday by the Supreme Court (CSJN), was a “certificate of dignity,” contrasting her situation with those accused of corruption during the Macrismo government, who -she claimed- faced no consequences.

Speaking at a Peronist Resistance Day event, CFK described the CSJN as a tool of economic power and accused the judiciary of political persecution, particularly after announcing her candidacy for the Province of Buenos Aires' Lower House.

She warned that President Javier Milei’s economic model, likened to past failed policies like those of José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz (in the late 1970s and early 1980s) and the Convertibility plan of the 1990s, is doomed to fail and insisted that her potential imprisonment would not resolve the economic crisis.

CFK also urged Milei to reconsider policies harming pensioners, workers, scientists, and teachers, while forecasting that “the people always come back.” Hence, she called for Peronist unity to prepare an alternative as the current government falters.

“Possibly some people think that they can defeat or humiliate us with this”, said the former president regarding a possible conviction against her. “As long as those who ... indebted the country twice with the IMF and continue indebting it, those of the highways, wind farms, those of the post office, walk down the street free of dust and straw, believe me that being imprisoned is a certificate of dignity. Believe it because I feel it that way,” CFK stressed while pledging not to quit the fight because “Peronists are not like that mafia right wing that flees for three years and when they return to the country, after having organized judicial round tables to persecute and imprison businessmen and activists, they are released and acquitted.”

CFK also recalled that under Macri, in 2017, her political party was deemed to have been finished, and yet it came back in 2019, although “it did not go well.”

At any rate, Milei's “model has an expiration date, it is running out”, and ”we know that because it is a copy of what (José Alfredo) Martínez de Hoz did [or] the Convertibility during the 90's,“ CFK also noted. ”These models have failed historically,“ she also pointed out. And when it does, there will not be ”anything to replace it“ with since the Judiciary is ”looking for how to disarm and disarticulate the possible popular and political organization that will necessarily take place.”