Now officially under house arrest for the next six years, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner joins the league of Latin American leaders who feel they are unfairly either jailed, exiled and/or excluded from the game of democracy. From Bolivia’s Evo Morales to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, but also Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and Venezuela’s María Corina Machado, the list includes people from both left and right alike.
Each case is different, but the pattern is clear: courts are being used to resolve political differences. Fernández de Kirchner has called it “lawfare.” One clear victim of it was another Brazilian, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the only one on the list who has so far turned his fate around and come back as president. Symbolically, Lula is now planning to come to Buenos Aires to visit and offer his support to Fernández de Kirchner.
Only one in two citizens of Latin America support democracy, according to the Latinobarómetro survey conducted every year over the last 30 years. The year 2024 saw a slight improvement (52 percent) from the all-time low a year earlier (48 percent), but these numbers are far from the all-time highs of 63–65 percent in the mid-1990s and early 2010s. The reason is mostly economic: except for the short periods of economic boom during the Washington Consensus in the 1990s and the commodities supercycle of the 2000s, the region has become more unequal and insecure for most citizens. Suspicions that popular candidates are left out of races arbitrarily will only increment that trend.
The arrest and jailing of a political opponent may be good news for incumbents in the short term, but nothing good results in the medium to long term. President Javier Milei did not want Fernández de Kirchner arrested and banned – he wanted to beat her at the polls. The outcome speaks well of the President’s lack of influence over the country’s court system – which is a weakness rather than a strength, but an involuntary virtue nonetheless.
With Fernández de Kirchner’s detention and ban as the new reality of Argentine politics, her ghost will linger in almost every political scene, from congressional debate to, of course, elections. Latin American history shows that old wounds keep coming back unless they are sealed democratically. Until recently, Argentina was a two-coalition system alternating office, at least twice, over a decade. Kirchner led the centre-left and former president Mauricio Macri led the centre-right. People would vote in favour of one or the other, but also mostly against one or the other. Now Fernández de Kirchner will be able to say, as she did this week in a taped audio address to a packed Plaza de Mayo demonstrating against her arrest: “They know that if they let me run, I would beat them.” Legally out of the race, nobody will be able to prove her right or wrong.
At first sight, an outside observer might think that the exit of Fernández de Kirchner from the race would strengthen Milei’s political and economic programmes. Foreign investors vividly remember how they put their money on Macri in 2015 only to see Fernández de Kirchner and her “populism” return four years later. Reality seems to point otherwise: Cristina’s arrest unites Peronism around the concept of “resistance” marking a large part of its history. Party leader Juan Perón was a political ghost for 18 years while in exile until he proved everybody electorally unbeatable in 1973 and then incapable of running the country for the few months he was in office until his death a few months later.
Fernández de Kirchner will be happy to invoke her own ghost as Milei’s Argentina materialises and the President’s room to blame the past for present reality slowly melts away. She believes – and her followers trust her – that the chainsaw-driven, neoliberal programme Milei is implementing will sooner or later falter and fall apart.
Most Argentines are not seeing that yet. With inflation going down and the Central Bank accumulating reserves by force of debt, there is no crisis in the immediate horizon, meaning voters will likely extend Milei a new cheque in the midterm elections. But the ghost will now be there for good, waiting for its moment to jump back in. And ghosts, as we all know, are tough to beat.
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