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Thousands of Argentinians marching this Friday in front of the seat of the presidency of Argentina, Casa Rosada, Buenos Aires, showing their support for Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner after the assassination attempt against her. Photo: Periodismo en Linea.
By Atilio Boron – Sep 3, 2022
Never as in this case has been more appropriate the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s famous novel. The attempt on the life of the vice president of the nation was the predictable corollary of years of attacks and aggression of all kinds, in which Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has been ridiculed and defamed relentlessly. The cruelty with which she was execrated by the infamous inhabitants of the national media sewer—the people who find their most comfortable habitat in that pestilential torrent of excrement and waste of all kinds; the cruelty with which she was denigrated by the leadership of the bloodthirsty Argentine right, which continues to long for, with nostalgia, the times of the genocidal dictatorship; and the cruelty with which she was insulted by the political and intellectual representatives of the de facto powers, all inflamed by visceral hatred towards CFK (and what in one way or another represents the people and the nobodies) had, sooner rather than later, to lead to the appearance of a hitman willing to take all these premises to their ultimate practical consequence: to physically eliminate whoever appeared in this media bombardment as a satanic figure, the very personification of evil.
That is why the failed assassination attempt must be analyzed as the endpoint of a perverse process marked by a succession of gestures, messages and speeches of death whose issuers are, objectively speaking, the masterminds or at least instigators of the failed attack against the vice president. They installed and applauded the appearance of guillotines, gallows, mortuary bags, coffins at Plaza de Mayo and other places, all with the face or name of Cristina. Legislators and principal leaders of the opposition demanded life imprisonment or the death penalty for her and her collaborators, accused her of committing the worst crimes against the republic. Scandalous statements were heard and read in favor of the right to bear and use firearms supposedly justified in the name of freedom, knowing that these manifestations would fall on ears ready to pass from words to deeds. Nothing was accidental.
This poisonous climate of opinion that calls for violence was meticulously encouraged by the daily media vomiting, without pause, of a troop of criminals, the pseudo-journalists of the media sewer who hide their wicked maneuvers at the service of de facto powers under the cloak of freedom of expression. The zenith of this deplorable process was the vociferous—and insubstantial—allegation of an obscure lawyer whom the media assassin convinced that he was the very reincarnation of Cato the Elder, who ended all his speeches in the Roman Senate with the war cry of “Destroy Carthage.”
Exalted by the manipulation to which he was subjected by “the media,” the old senator’s operetta successor appealed to a similar formula and in a booming voice proclaimed that “Cristina is the head of an illicit association” and that for the good of the republic she had to be destroyed. With all these elements present, the table was served for the appearance of the assassin to pull the trigger. But those who loaded the bullets into Fernando Sabag Montiel’s pistol were “the prophets of hate,” to use Arturo Jauretche’s very appropriate expression coined in times when the right wing had given free rein to its murderous fury and was bombing defenseless civilians who were passing through Plaza de Mayo on a normal weekday.
Those prophets of hate must also be brought to justice, along with the failed assassin. History has already condemned them; it is time for the prosecutors and judges of this long-suffering country to do the same.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/SC
Atilio A. Borón is a Harvard Graduate professor of political theory at the University of Buenos Aires and was executive secretary of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). He has published widely in several languages a variety of books and articles on political theory and philosophy, social theory, and comparative studies on the capitalist development in the periphery. He is an international analyst, writer and journalist and profoundly Latinoamerican.
