Liberty not advancing for everybody

If we go back 40 years in time, we have the milestone “Nunca Más” (“Never Again”) trial of the military juntas in 1985 and if we rewind a further four decades from there, we have the mass mobilisation of October 17 giving birth to the Peronist movement in 1945 – some exalted minds might find reason to see recent developments as a synthesis of 1945 and 1985 containing elements of both after a further gap of 40 years. Last Wednesday’s march would thus be viewed as the backlash of the masses against the arbitrary imprisonment of their leader with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner climbing on the shoulders of Juan Domingo Perón. On the other side of the fence the “Vialidad” trial of the fraudulent allocation of Santa Cruz highway contracts would be presented as a “Never again” against mega-corruption, showing not even the most powerful politician of this century to be above the law and asserting the primacy of hard facts over the narrative supposedly dominating our post-truth era.

Early days for assessing the true dimensions of the Kirchnerite march (whose numbers were estimated at anything between 40,000 by the City Police to a million by its organisers) – was it a one-off event or the start of a resistance finding expression at regular intervals like the midweek pension protests? Originally directed against the judicial branch, its target ended up being the executive branch. Fernández de Kirchner had been summoned to the Comodoro Py courthouse last Wednesday to be notified of the start of her prison sentence with the idea of defiantly presenting herself there at the head of a huge multitude. But on the eve of that confrontation the judges decided to spare themselves and downtown traffic the strain by notifying her of her house arrest remote a day early. The target of Wednesday’s march was thus deflected to the Plaza de Mayo in front of the Casa Rosada, thus making it even more political than originally intended.

The Supreme Court confirmation of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s prison sentence has gifted an increasingly divided Peronism struggling to shrug off the discredit of the disastrous Alberto Fernández presidency a cause around which to rally in unity but in the long term this cause may only serve to deepen the divisions. “When I define, I exclude” was one of the favourite aphorisms of Juan Domingo Perón – if the path of resistance leads the movement into the hands of hard-core militants headed by Máximo Kirchner, mainstream Peronists in particular and the floating voter in general could fall by the wayside with the success of this cause in reviving Kirchnerism being in direct proportion to the polarisation of the upcoming campaign and hence the fate of third parties. Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof might have no choice now but to join the chorus of indignation against an “unjust” prison sentence and pledge unity but the responsibility for September’s provincial election (if it goes ahead) is now his more than ever and he stands in need of some “new songs.”

There can be no doubt that the Vialidad conviction was a milestone – the question remains whether there is a path to accompany it. The conviction of a former two-term president delivers a powerful message to banish impunity and reaffirm that there is such a thing as equality before the law with power no longer a guarantee of privilege. With the current government defining itself as “anarcho-capitalist” and with authority in crisis everywhere – whether in the family, the classroom or the workplace – an institution has demonstrated that it still has the power to set limits. The legal profession and investigative journalism can reassure themselves that the painstaking assembly of concrete evidence still counts for something within the liquid democracy of the social networks.

Yet having said all this, one swallow does not make a summer – a single verdict can never refute accusations of double standards with both sides needing to be covered. The weight of evidence in the Vialidad trial has made its exposé of corruption impossible to deny but this milestone will count for nothing if investigation of President Javier Milei’s flagrant ‘$LIBRA’ cryptocurrency promotion is simultaneously airbrushed. Both Wednesday’s march and Fernández de Kirchner’s conviction need to be seen as points of departure, not arrival, deciding nothing – the problem with “historic” developments is that they are always in danger of becoming history. Today may be the first day of winter but winter for whom?