Cristina Kirchner speaks in Plaza de Mayo during the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of her husband Néstor Kirchner coming to power May 25, 2023 in Buenos Aires.Mario De Fina (AP)
“They want me dead or imprisoned,” Cristina Kirchner wrote in a long letter posted on her social networks this Monday. The former Argentine President therefore criticized the decision of the public prosecutor’s office to drop the investigation into the attempted assassination suffered on him, without going beyond the three material authors. The State Department found there was no evidence that the attack was financed or organized, as Kirchner claims, by an opposition political environment, and sent those arrested to appear in court. “It is an act of consecration of impunity,” lamented the vice president.
On September 1, 2022, Cristina Kirchner arrived at her home in Buenos Aires when a 35-year-old man named Fernando Sabag Montiel mingled with the crowd and shot her twice in the head. The gun jammed and Sabag Montiel was arrested by the protesters accompanying the Vice President that afternoon. Police later arrested his girlfriend Brenda Uliarte, 23, and weeks later Nicolás Carrizo, a friend of the couple, who was accused of necessary involvement in the failed attack. Judge María Eugenia Capuchetti charged her with attempted murder. “I pulled the bolt back and when I pulled the trigger it didn’t fire. “In the midst of so much commotion and so many people, I was nervous,” Sabag told Montiel months later from prison. Kirchner never accepted that this trio, who survived by selling sugar flakes on the street, were capable of planning an assassination without assistance.
During the investigation, the vice president’s attorneys called for an investigation into whether they received outside funding. They targeted an opposition MP, Gerardo Milman, who witnesses said knew about the attack before it happened. Milman is linked to presidential candidate Patricia Bullrich, secretary of security during Mauricio Macri’s administration. The complaint also called for progress against a far-right organization called the Federal Revolution, known for throwing torches at the Casa Rosada and marching against Kirchner with a depiction of his guillotined head.
Prosecutor Carlos Rívolo, in charge of the investigation, said that the three arrested “did not receive any amount of money in the two years prior to the attack that would indicate they were funded to carry out an act like the one investigated here.” Evidence collected, he added, “prevents the existence of any organization of any kind, political party or partisan, person or group of people that in any way funded, plotted, covered up or in any way colluded with the accused.” Attacking Kirchner.
Photo found on Sabag Montiel’s cell phone showing him posing with the gun used in the failed attack on Cristina Kirchner.RR. HH
The conclusions did not sit well with the Vice President. “I’ve said it a thousand times: Neither Capuchetti nor Rívolo wanted to investigate the assassination and now they want to complete the investigation with a speed that they never proved anyway,” Kirchner wrote. “The whole investigation was characterized by avoiding the truth. It is plagued by witnesses who erased their phones, evidence that it was vandalized without investigating the causes and motivations, and an apparent and desperate attempt to avoid the discovery of possible third-party, financier and instigator involvement. As I said before, there is no justice for CFRP and there will never be any, either as a defendant or as a victim.”
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