Kirchners

The ruling makes her subject to arrest and bars her from running in upcoming Buenos Aires legislative elections.

Argentina’s Supreme Court has upheld a six-year prison sentence on corruption charges for former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

The ruling on Tuesday, which permanently bars the divisive 72-year-old from public office and makes her subject to arrest, prompted crowds of her supporters to block the streets of Buenos Aires in protest.

The left-wing former president denounced the ruling, claiming the court’s judges were acting in the service of the economically powerful.

“They’re three puppets answering to those ruling far above them,” she told supporters outside her party’s headquarters in Buenos Aires, in an apparent reference to the government of her rival, President Javier Milei.

“It’s the concentrated economic power of Argentina’s government.”

The ruling was welcomed by Milei, a libertarian fiercely opposed to Fernandez de Kirchner’s brand of high-spending politics, which critics blamed for years of economic volatility and soaring inflation.

“Justice. End,” he wrote on X.

‘Abundance of evidence’

Fernandez de Kirchner, who succeeded her husband Nestor Kirchner as president in 2007 and remained in power until 2015, had been found guilty by a federal court in 2022 of having directed irregular state public works contracts to a friend during her and her husband’s years in power.

She claimed the conviction was politically motivated and appealed to the Supreme Court.

But the judges rejected Fernandez de Kirchner’s appeal, writing in a resolution that her sentence did “nothing more than … protect our republican and democratic system”, The Associated Press news agency reported.

“The sentences handed down by the previous courts were based on the abundance of evidence produced,” the judges wrote, according to the AFP news agency.

The ruling makes her conviction and appeal definitive, and likely draws a line under her lengthy political career, just days after she launched her campaign for the Buenos Aires legislative elections in September.

The former president has five days to turn herself in to authorities, although her lawyer has requested she be able to serve her sentence under house arrest due to her age, the AP reported.

The threat of arrest mobilised the former president’s supporters around her. Daniel Dragoni, a councillor from Buenos Aires, told AFP he was “destroyed” by the ruling but promised that her left-wing political movement would “return, as always”.

But historian Sergio Berensztein told AFP he believed the calls for her release would be short-lived and have limited effect.

“She is not the Cristina of 2019,” he said.

June 10 (UPI) — Former Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner must serve her six-year prison sentence for a corruption conviction, the nation’s Supreme Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday.

The three-judge court unanimously upheld Kirchner’s 2022 corruption conviction and ruled she is banned from holding public office.

The conviction arises from how awards for 51 public works projects were issued in what became the “Vialidad” trial.

Kirchner, 72, received due process, and the “rulings issued by the lower courts were based on extensive evidence assessed in accordance with the rules of sound judgment and the penal code enacted by Congress,” the judges wrote in Tuesday’s verdict.

She had argued that the trial arose from political persecution because she is an influential leader of the opposition to current Argentine President Javier Milei and his government.

Kirchner was Argentina’s president from 2007 to 2015. She also was Argentina’s vice president from 2019 to 2023.

She is a popular leftist politician and recently announced she intended to run for a seat during the Sept. 7 Buenos Aires Province legislative elections.

If she were to run and win, the victory would have given Kirchner immunity against imprisonment over the four-year term as a provincial lawmaker.

The Supreme Court’s decision against her makes it impossible for Kirchner to seek any public office.

“The republic works,” Milei said in a translated statement made during his visit to Israel.

“All the corrupt journalists, accomplices of politicians, have been exposed in their operetta about the alleged pact of impunity,” Milei said.

The Federal Oral Court 2 in December 2022 found Kirchner guilty of corruption, sentenced her to prison and imposed a lifetime disqualification from holding public office due to “fraudulent administration to the detriment of the state.”

She was allowed to stay out of prison while the Supreme Court deliberated the case.

Kirchner similarly was charged with fraud in 2016 and was convicted in February 2021, which made her Argentina’s first vice president to be convicted of a crime while still in office.

She was accused of and convicted of directing 51 public works contracts to a company owned by Kirchner’s friend and business associate, Lazaro Baez.

The scheme also directed $1 billion to Baez, who is serving a 12-year sentence for a money-laundering conviction in 2021 and was sentenced to another six years in prison for charges arising from the case that resulted inKirchner’s conviction.