Former Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner speaks at the Justicialist Party headquarters in Buenos Aires on June 9, 2025. Photo: Stringer/Xinhua News.
By Charo SolĂs – Jul. 13, 2025
On June 9, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) spoke from the Justicialist Party. It was a political intervention on the brink of judicial proceedings, a message on the eve of the start of her house arrest. From this setting steeped in history, Fernández not only spoke about her case but also inscribed her conviction within a longer history: that of the political persecution of Peronism in Argentina. That history began with a bombing of Plaza de Mayo to assassinate Juan Domingo Perón and continued with regulations such as the famous Decree No. 4161, which prohibited even naming the movement, and continued with criminal regulations that punished those who identified themselves as Peronists. When the regulations were not enough, came the executions, the repression of protests, and, in its most brutal expression, the systematic plan of forced disappearances, murders, and the abduction of minors carried out by the last civil-military dictatorship that began in 1976.
In this context, Fernández argued that the court’s ruling is not a technical decision but an operation of real power. She said that “this restriction on the popular vote is not imposed by this triumvirate of unsavory figures who act as a fiction of the Supreme Court,” but rather by “the concentrated economic power of the Argentinian Republic.” Recent events highlight an urgent need to make visible how democracy and concentrated economic sectors relate in Argentina.
From proscription to reinvention
Fernández’ interpretation has a precise historical precedent: the proscription of Peronism after the 1955 coup. Decree 4161 legally prohibited any symbol, name, or reference to the movement founded by Juan PerĂłn. They couldn’t even name him, much less vote for him. Political scientist Catalina Smulovitz recalls that the repression wasn’t just military: it was legal, institutional, and strategic. The objective wasn’t just to erase PerĂłn, but to prevent the people from being represented in him.
History has been a laboratory of reactions: the massive blank vote of 1957, Frondizi’s pact with PerĂłn in Caracas, the amnesty of 1958, the multiple attempts to “integrate” Peronism without PerĂłn. Nothing worked. Each exclusionary movement ended up further consolidating the popular identity they sought to annul, and these were successive failures of regimes that attempted to build governability behind the backs of the majority movement.
That history—of executions, silencing, and suppressed votes—is not alien to the present. It returns in other forms, other names, other instruments.
Fernández as a pivotal figure: between history and threat
If Peronism is a problem for real power, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is its latest disruptive version. And that problem has nothing to do with her as a person, but with what she represents: a politics of redistribution, the pursuit of sovereignty, and the expansion of rights. In the words of sociologist Soledad Stoessel, “Cristina Kirchner is a pivotal figure. She, along with Nestor Kirchner, led the Peronist experience in Argentina in the new century, in step with other governments in the region in what was approached from the social sciences as the region’s shift to the left.”
At the end of this period, marked by various attempts to consolidate Latin American unity, a machinery emerged that, while denouncing, propagates a unified narrative across all the country’s media outlets to ensure a public condemnation that arrives before the end of the judicial proceedings. Today, they also rely on social media, which they present as an “alternative” ecosystem, but which operate as sounding boards for traditional media. Catalina Smulovitz shows in her recent investigations how CFK was accused in at least twelve simultaneous court cases. Many of them were dropped due to lack of evidence or irregularities in the proceedings. But that didn’t matter: the punishment had already taken place. “The strategy is to erode the image without the need for a final conviction,” she explains. Fernández explained it in detail: the trial in the Vialidad case began in May 2019, days before the closing of the lists for the presidential elections. “The Peronist candidate was going to be sitting in the dock for the entire previous month.”
But the judicial-media logic didn’t stop there. The conviction—and then the attempted assassination—were part of a larger plan: to break her leadership and dismantle Peronism as a force representing the people.
The judicial district: heirs without uniform
For decades, coups against popular governments were carried out by the military party. But in the 21st century, Fernández explains, the method changed: boots are no longer necessary, but robes are. The judicialization of politics has replaced traditional coups as a form of intervention in democratic processes. The judicial party is the successor to the military party as a form of interruption of the popular democratic order.
The Argentinian case is not unique, but it is paradigmatic. As in Brazil with Lula or in Ecuador with Correa, the courts become the central stage of political games. Lawfare—according to Smulovitz—is not only a practice of persecution, but also a speech act: a way to instill suspicion, undermine legitimacy, and divert public attention. “The punishment is not the sentence: it’s the process,” she warns. The accumulation of cases, pretrial detention without conviction, media leaks, performative prosecutors: all are part of the same engineering.
Argentina’s Supreme Court Upholds Conviction of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (+Lawfare)
Judges, media, algorithms
The Supreme Court has just upheld a court ruling without firm evidence, in the midst of a country devastated by Javier Milei’s austerity measures. In this context, Fernández’ words don’t retreat into lament. It’s a wake-up call: if they can’t thwart the popular will at the polls, they’ll try by other means. What’s at stake isn’t just a person, but a historic possibility: that the Argentinian people will once again represent themselves. “They don’t want there to be an organized alternative when this collapses,” she warned.
It is an attempt to reconstruct meaning in a time of profound despair, when repression threatens popular mobilization and activists are being arrested for absurd reasons. The political-media-judicial apparatus is now reaping what it has been sowing for years: it is increasingly distancing itself from those excluded by the austerity policies and is using its written word and media airtime to try to disconnect Peronism from its popular base. Faced with this, the response cannot be only denunciation. Fernández once again addressed the activists. “They want to divide us, they want us to think about lists, about positions. But it is time to stand with those who need it most,” she said in her final speech.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
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