Argentina: A painful democratic setback

The scandalous proportions that the slow but incurable putrefaction of Federal Justice in Argentina has assumed, together with the sensational revelations of the meeting of a group of judges, prosecutors, a security minister of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, a former agent of the intelligence services, and two very high officials of the Clarín Multimedia Group at the residence of the British usurper Joseph Lewis in Lago Escondido, in the heart of Patagonia, mark with ominous traits the current moment of Argentine political life.

How to characterize this situation, when on December 10 we should have celebrated 39 years of our recovered democracy? Unfortunately, the diagnosis does not give rise to any optimism: in recent times our democracy has suffered a significant setback. Today, Argentina has a much less democratic political system than it used to have four or five years ago. The malignant tumor that nested in Comodoro Py, the headquarters of the Federal Justice, has metastasized and has taken over a large part of the system. The legal monstrosity perpetrated with the so-called Causa Vialidad, which examined alleged irregularities in a road construction program in the southern province of Santa Cruz and the sentence handed down on Cristina Fernández de Kirchner: six years in prison plus disqualification for life from holding any public office means that political exclusion and prescription, have returned to govern the political life of this country.

Unfortunately, nothing of this is new. It already happened in the past after the 1955 coup d’etat when the right-wing parties and their military instrument imposed an eighteen-year ban on Peronism. This policy sought to "return the country to normality" prior to 1945, and the only thing it achieved was to institutionalize the "military party" as the despotic final arbiter of Argentine public life. Numerous riots, two bloody military dictatorships (1966-1973 and 1976-1983), and more than thirty thousand disappeared persons (previously kidnapped, tortured, and killed) were some of the consequences of that ill-fated decision.

After such a traumatic experience, enhanced by the tragic aftermath of the Malvinas War, a pact was sealed between the different political actors by which the military coup would never again be used to settle the conflicts that engulfed the country. The problem is that this pact is broken today: the resort to violence has become “naturalized” among the furious and increasingly intolerant forces of the right. Their language and gestures reflect violence rarely seen in our recovered democracy; the failed assassination attempt against Cristina, the Vice President of the Nation, has been naturalized by the media hitmen and even in court, where the legal proceedings talk of the "attempted assassination" instead of “attempted magnicide", and now the ban of Cristina but also of the citizen’s rights of a third of the electorate of this country which are loyal followers of her leadership. Not only can she not aspire to hold public office. Because of the aforementioned ruling, those who have placed their trust in her leadership have been stripped of their political rights, have become disenfranchised, and were reduced to the status of second-class citizens who cannot assert their preferences in the political sphere.

Yes, the "military party" no longer exists, but the empire and the neocolonial right have worked hard to replace it with an even more lethal "judicial party" that, lawfare through and in alliance with the media duopoly that with its fake news, slander, and cover-ups poisons the soul of Argentines and Argentines. Both, the corrupt judiciary and the hegemonic media have taken over the country and in Argentina, as in almost all of Latin America, they persecute, imprison, and outlaw popular leaders. In front of this situation, it is imperative to rebuild our democracy. For this, the government must call without further delay a referendum so that it is the people who decide the steps that must be taken to put an end to the mafia entrenched in the Federal Justice and democratize the media system; essential conditions to end once and for all with the power of the “media-judicial dictatorship.” Without this call and without a strong “mass pressure from below” that allows the ferocious resistance of the right to break down, our democracy will languish until it gives birth to renewed and more sinister form of despotism.