Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, on Loyalty Day, October 17, 2025, at 1111 San José Street in Buenos Aires, where she is under house arrest. Fernández de Kirchner waves to her supporters from the balcony of her home. Photo: Matias Rosingana/Zuma Press/Europa Press.
The conviction, the electoral ban, the assassination attempt and the dispute over Argentina’s political direction are all part of the same story. Five keys to understanding what the imprisonment of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner means, one year on.
Exactly one year ago, on June 9, 2025, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner spoke from the Justicialist Party headquarters. It was a political intervention on the edge of the judicial, a message on the eve of the start of her house arrest. There, she framed her legal situation within a historical tradition in Argentina of institutional violence and proscription against Peronism.
One year later, those definitions continue to function as a roadmap for understanding what her conviction means and what national project it seeks to discipline.
Key 1: A history that started long before Cristina
This is a historical process that neither begins nor ends with Cristina’s imprisonment. That history started with a bombing of Plaza de Mayo aimed at assassinating Juan Domingo Perón, continued with regulations such as the infamous Decree No. 4161—which prohibited even naming the movement—and went on with penal norms that punished those who identified as Peronists.
The objective was not only to erase Perón but to prevent the people from feeling that they could participate in politics. When regulations proved insufficient, executions were carried out, demonstrations were repressed, and the systematic plan of forced disappearances, murders, and appropriation of children was carried out, as in the case of the last civic-military dictatorship that began in 1976. That history returns in different forms, with different names and different instruments.
While the series of injustices against Cristina is serious—lawfare, attempted assassination, imprisonment, and her banishment from politics—it will not mark the end of the persecution of socialist projects. Whoever believes that this persecution will only happen to Cristina is mistaken. But so too is whoever imagines that a national and popular project can be built without her. Because Cristina is not in prison despite representing those interests: she is in prison precisely for representing them.
Key 2: The economic power behind the conviction
The decisions of the Supreme Court operate in tune with the interests of the country’s concentrated economic sectors, identified by the former president herself as the true architects of the stranglehold on voting power. These same economic groups evaded convictions for their participation in the last military dictatorship through legal maneuvers that delayed cases for decades, consolidating their impunity.
During the democratic period, these corporations used the “revolving door” mechanism to place technocrats in the state and finance center-right parties. The Cambiemos alliance, led by Mauricio Macri during his presidency between 2015 and 2019, served as the political articulator of these corporate lineages, supporting the financing of their electoral campaigns and the appointment of their representatives to key state positions.
Recent history offers concrete examples of this dynamic. The Ledesma case is one of the most emblematic. Carlos Pedro Blaquier died in 2023 without a conviction for the events of the “Night of the Blackout,” while members of his family circle subsequently occupied significant state positions. Something similar occurred with Adolfo Navajas Artaza, owner of Las Marías, investigated for crimes linked to state terrorism and who died without a final sentence.
The relationship between democracy and economic power remains one of the central questions of Argentina’s politics. These corporate sectors, shielded from judicial sanctions for their participation in the last military dictatorship, find in the Milei administration today a phase of expansion and an opportunity for strengthening their interests.
The Large Investment Incentive Regime (RIGI) represents the consolidation of this scheme, granting extraordinary benefits that facilitate the transfer of strategic natural resources to concentrated capital. For Cristina, it represents the most complete expression of this alliance between economic power and the state.
During her address at the “Day of Peronist Resistance,” the former president warned about the limits of the model, stating that the country cannot be saved with a purely extractivist economy devoid of added value, since that model serves only small regional enclaves and is unviable for sustaining the manufacturing structure of the large urban industrial belts.
Key 3. Robes replaced boots
For decades, blows against popular governments were carried out by the military party. But in the 21st century, Cristina explains, the method changed: boots are no longer necessary—robes are [referring to the robes of judges]. The judicialization of politics replaced classic coups as a form of intervention in democratic processes.
The “judicial party” is the successor to the military party as a means of interfering with the evolution of democracy. To understand lawfare, one must accept that it is a legal strategy that seeks to manipulate the democratic process and artificially abort political projects that are aimed at expanding rights.
As Cristina Kirchner warned, “political, social, and union leadership is on parole.” This persecution is complemented by a media apparatus that is subservient to spreading stories about scandals, even when their claims are not backed up by evidence.
One of the most revealing examples is occurring right now, in May 2026, in the trial of the “Notebooks” case. What for years was presented as an exemplary case is now beginning to show the cracks of a mechanism that used the threat of pretrial detention and judicial pressure to construct accusations.
Key 4: The bullet that didn’t fire
The escalation against Cristina Fernández de Kirchner reached an even more dramatic point on September 1, 2022. The assassination attempt was not an isolated accident or the action of an unhinged individual. It was the culmination of years of judicial persecution, media demonization, and political violence.
In her book Prisoner or Dead, journalist Irina Hauser sheds light on the “state of possibility” in which it occurred: an explosive combination of hate speech from judges, politicians, and hegemonic media outlets calling for the “eradication” or “extermination” of Kirchnerism. The bullet that did not fire averted a tragedy but did not erase the mark of a broken democracy.
The criminal legal process was limited to judging the material perpetrators of the “Copitos gang” while blocking the investigation into the financiers and political instigators of the attack. This institutional paralysis shielded figures from the opposition political arc, such as PRO national deputy Gerardo Milman, a close associate of Patricia Bullrich, who was identified by witnesses after having anticipated the attack days before its execution near the National Congress.
Despite the testimonies and the prosecution’s demands to investigate the hierarchical links behind the attack, the legal investigation dispersed the operational leads and reduced the case file to a lone-actor narrative.
Key 5: The dispute over the future of Peronism
Perhaps this is one of the deepest political consequences of the conviction. The political landscape reveals a striking fact: Cristina ranks as the political figure with the best public image in the country—something affirmed by the constant and sustained turnout at the corner of San José 1111, where she serves her house arrest. If Peronism is a problem for real power, Cristina is its most recent and disruptive incarnation.
And that problem is what she represents: a politics of distribution, of the pursuit of sovereignty, of the expansion of rights. As she herself said in Plaza de Mayo: “To redistribute income, you often have to make an ugly face at those who have too much… That is why they hate me, persecute me, and proscribe me.”
The persecution has effects that go beyond Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. It also operates on Peronism itself. It seeks to open divisions, deepen differences, and reshape the political landscape in the absence of its principal figure. The underlying question is not only why Cristina remains in prison—but also what kind of Argentina has been built on the basis of that proscription.
Milei didn’t fall from the sky
The government of Javier Milei would have been impossible without a long campaign of political stigmatization aimed at eroding the historical legacy of Kirchnerism and breaking part of the social consensus built over recent decades. Cristina’s imprisonment and Milei’s rise are not separate stories. They are phenomena in dialogue with each other, expressing the same transformation of Argentina’s political landscape.
No political project sustains itself solely on denunciation. As Cristina warned in her most recent public interventions, the challenge remains to rebuild the bonds of solidarity and organization with those who suffer most from the consequences of the current economic model. There, perhaps, something more important than a candidacy or an election is at stake: the very possibility of building a national project once again.
Democracy Under Siege: The Case of Cristina Kirchner and the Return of Proscription
(Diario Red) by Charo Solís
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/CB/SL
Cameron Baillie is an award-winning journalist, editor, and researcher. He won and was shortlisted for awards across Britain and Ireland. He is Editor-in-Chief of New Sociological Perspectives graduate journal and Commissioning Editor at The Student Intifada newsletter. He spent the first half of 2025 living, working, and writing in Ecuador. He does news translation and proofreading work with The Orinoco Tribune.
