Attack on Congress: the defendants rejected that Cristina Kirchner is a complainant in the case

The defence of those accused of the incidents to Vice President Cristina Kirchner's Senate office appealed the decision of federal judge María Eugenia Capuchetti to have the presidency of the upper house as complainant, which had requested it through Graciana Peñafort, the Director General of Affairs Legal.

The presentation, which Infobae agreed, was made by lawyer María del Rosario Fernández, member of the Association of Lawyers of the Argentine Republic, which defends Leandro Marcelo Cáceres, one of the alleged aggressors, in the case. Cáceres refused to testify before the magistrate and benefited from being exempted from prison.

Cristina Kirchner, always through Peñafort, who knew how to be his lawyer in cases such as the Memorandum with Iran, understood that the militants of various picket currents who vandalized her office, among others, would have committed the crimes of “aggravated harm, art. 184 para. 1, 4 and 5 CP; public intimidation, art. 211 CP and attempted injury, art. 90 and 42 CP”.

However, the defense attorney understands the opposite. For example, he questions that the attacks occurred “in order to prevent the free exercise of authority”. And, on the other hand, damage to “public goods” or, eventually, to “monuments”.

To use this thought, Fernández takes the words of the magistrate herself who, in requesting the “inhibition” of the Buenos Aires justice system to continue investigating the facts, said that everything happened “when the Honorable Chamber of Deputies of the Nation was holding a public session, in order to discuss the agreement reached with the International Monetary Fund”. This means that the “authority” purportedly sought to prevent “the free exercise of authority” would eventually be the Chamber of Deputies of the Nation and not the Senate, which was not in session at that time.

Regarding the “goods for public use” affected, always according to the judicial presentation of the defender of the accused, “these would undoubtedly be the property of the Congress of the Nation or more precisely of the National Legislative Power, the Senate and, even less so, of the Presidency of that House”.

For “La Guild” of lawyers, the Presidency of the Upper House, headed by the Vice-President of the Nation, is not a victim “of alleged crimes of harm” and therefore “does not own the legal property concerned”. For this reason, it is used in the presentation before Capuchetti, “the Tribunal should not accept it in the capacity it invokes”, that is, as a complainant.

This is maintained despite the images showing the vandalization of the office of the former head of state and the fact that the session by agreement of the Government with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was held in the lower house.

On this point, lawyer Fernández told Infobae: “Not only was the Vice-President's office vandalized, other offices too, so should the Honorable Senate not have been presented, but the Legislative Branch as a whole should have been presented. Not a House and just the House that wasn't sitting. That is why we challenge the presentation of Cristina Fernández in the file.”

On the other hand, the defense lawyer assures that, according to the National Constitution, only the Public Prosecutor's Office can promote the alleged crime of “public intimidation”, a power that is not granted to the legislature “nor, in particular, in its Second Chapter, dedicated to the Senate, nor in the Fourth, referring to the powers of the Congress, to suggest that this Power may overlap with the Judicial or the Public Prosecutor's Office in the prosecution of crimes other than those established by the Constitution itself (articles 53 and 59 CN) ″.

For this reason, Fernández insists: “The Senate of the Nation cannot use the figure of the complaint to try to criminally prosecute anyone.” For the defendants' counsel, this would be a “mockery of the mandate of the Constitution and the division of powers under the pretext of an otherwise prohibited analogue interpretation of the laws of criminal procedure”.

In the brief submitted to Judge Capuchetti, the defence of the accused stated: “Contrary to what the representative of the Presidency of the Senate intends to argue, the legislature cannot behave like any individual and trample on the strict division of powers established constitutionally.”

In the document presented yesterday, which bears Peñafort's signature, the presidency of the Senate points out that “despite the peaceful majority that demonstrated freely, it was possible to verify a group of people who, stationed at the intersection of Hipolito Yrigoyen and Entre Ríos streets, in a coordinated manner, began a violent attack on the Congress of the Nation, specifically on the windows that would open to the office of the Presidency of the Senate of the Nation where, at that time, the current Vice President of the Nation, Cristina E. Fernández de Kirchner, Senator Anabel Fernández Sagasti, Senator Oscar Parrilli and Deputy Máximo Kirchner were located among other collaborators”.

The document also states that “between the attacks with stones and the clear objective of the above-mentioned offices, marks were made with red paint on the area, a circumstance that could have served as a signpost”.

On this point, lawyer Fernández understands that neither can the presidency of the Senate of the Nation sustain the alleged crime of “minor, serious or very serious injury in the degree of attempt” against the officials who were in Cristina Kirchner's office because “the injuries attempted would result in a permanent weakening of the health, of a sense, of an organ, of a member or a permanent difficulty of speech or (had) endangered the life of the offended person, would have disabled him for work for more than a month or caused a permanent deformation of his face”, something that for the defender not only “did not happen” but “only is supported in its particular, and public version of events”.

He adds: “It intends to turn the events of a social and political protest similar to the many that have occurred in our unfortunate history of governments of different kinds, into an updated version of the claim of Louis XIV, the Sun King, who believed that everything (and the State too, of course) revolved around him. But they are still that: mere baseless speculation”.

For all of the above, the counsel for the accused requests that Judge Capuchetti “give immediate intervention to the superior” and that “the constitution of the Honorable Senate of the Nation as the complainant party be rescinded”.

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