twelve years in prison and life ineligibility required against Vice President Cristina Kirchner

A trial that shakes Argentina. Twelve years in prison, as well as life ineligibility, were requested on Monday, August 22, in Buenos Aires in a corruption trial against the Argentine vice-president Cristina Kirchner, figure of the Peronist left. The former head of state from 2007 to 2015, 69, was tried in this remote trial, and in his absence, for aggravated illicit association and fraudulent administration, a case of awarding public contracts in his stronghold of the province of Santa Cruz, in Patagonia (south), during his two presidential terms.

Vice-President and President of the Senate since 2019, she benefits at this stage from parliamentary immunity, which only the Supreme Court could lift if it were to confirm a possible conviction. Otherwise, she could run for the legislative and presidential elections at the end of 2023, even if she has so far not let her intentions filter.

After the requisitions will come at the beginning of September the defense pleadings, in this procedure opened in 2019, but which had been suspended by the Covid-19 pandemic. They should stretch over several months and the judgment should not be rendered until the end of 2022.

But, a sign of the impact of Cristina Kirchner, as popular on the left as she is divisive, spontaneous gatherings of several hundred opponents and supporters of the political leader took place Monday evening near her home in Buenos Aires, producing jostling and pushing a thick police cordon to use tear gas sprays, AFP noted.