Mauricio Macri was allowed to travel to Spain, Italy, Qatar and the United States by federal judge Julián Ercolini, who was in charge of the investigation into the alleged espionage of the families of ARA San Juan victims. The former head of state will be out of the country between March 25 and April 9. The complaint once again opposed the former president's departure from the country, but in a previous ruling the trip had been enabled because “his status as former president, it is understandable that invitations to events of different kinds fall on the appointed one”. If the measures set are met and Macri's judicial situation does not change, the ruling shows that the criteria for authorizations to leave the country will not be changed.
At the end of February, the judge had allowed Macri to travel to Uruguay on 8 and 9 March and to the United States from 13 to 21 March. On this occasion, the judge recalled: “As long as the situation in the face of the process is not changed and the requests are met, there will be, eventually, in a favorable direction; however, the duty to make the relevant request to this headquarters and the fulfillment of the same obligations to which it is subject in this office opportunity. This is because, as long as the same circumstances persist, a constant treatment of claims with similar characteristics would be an unnecessary waste.”
Thus, Ercolini stated that “the same obligations will be imposed on him as in the authorization to leave the country previously granted in this incident dated February 25, 2022, namely: to inform his return to the country within 48 hours of his arrival and to return to it if the process requires it to in advance”. And it must be recorded that the authorization will be subject to the various health measures in force or that could be adopted within the scope of the Executive Branch (in particular, with regard to the regime of entry and exit of the country, among others), in the context of the pandemic that is underway”.
On December 1, Mauricio Macri was prosecuted for espionage against the families of the victims of ARA San Juan, by order of the acting federal judge of Dolores Martín Bava, who found the former head of state responsible for the monitoring and cyberpatrolling carried out on a group of relatives of the crew members of the submarine who asked to search for the boat that was missing between November 2017 and the end of 2018. In addition, the judge seized him for the sum of 100 million pesos and again prohibited him from leaving the country, in a measure that had initially been issued in his call for inquiry and had been revoked by the Federal Chamber of Mar del Plata.
At the end of December, however, the Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation understood that the investigation that had begun in the court of Dolores three years ago with the so-called D'Alessio case should be passed to Comodoro Py. It was as a result of that file that the epicenter of the false lawyer was joined, by connection, the investigations against the AFI directors for the alleged espionage from the AMBA bases and then by the spying on the families of ARA San Juan. When the D'Alessio case went to the courts of Retiro, the fate of the other two cases were sealed along the same path. Judge Bava accepted the referral in early February. After some back and forth, the file was settled in the court of Ercolini.
Now, Ercolini has a period of four months to decide whether to bring the D'Alessio case - whose investigation was closed - to oral trial. Meanwhile, Chamber I of the Buenos Aires Federal Chamber must review the prosecutions handed down in the AMBA and ARA San Juan cases. With harsh criticism of Dolores Martin Bava's surrogate federal judge and insisting on his “bias”, Mauricio Macri lodged the appeal to the prosecution saying that he is innocent and that magistrate who called him into inquiry had handed down his indictment. “What is written is so brutal that sometimes the concern about whether there can be an unacceptable ghostwriter behind all this does not stop rumbling in my head,” he had said.
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