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Prosecutor Guillermo Marijuan said late last month there was no evidence that Fernández, a former president from 2007 to 2015, was involved in the corruption for which Báez has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.
This marks the latest instance in which the vice president has been dismissed from an ongoing corruption-related case before it reaches trial.

In contrast with the dismissals, the former president was sentenced in December of last year to six years in prison in a separate case for fraudulent administration, which included a lifetime ban on holding public office, for favoring Báez in the awarding of public works contracts. Báez was sentenced to six years in prison as part of that case which was unrelated to the "K money trail" that specifically deals with money laundering allegations.

The vice president's conviction can still be appealed and reviewed by higher courts, a process that could take years. She remains immune from arrest in the meantime ahead of October elections.

The decision came as Argentines have a general distrust of the justice system which is often slow and takes years to resolve cases. "The Argentine justice system is infiltrated by politics," said Lucas Romero, the head of Synopsis, a political consulting firm. "The federal courts are absolutely influenced by political interests from both sides."
That means supporters of the vice president are likely to see the dismissal as vindication to her long-held claims of innocence while her opponents will cite it as an example of how she got away with wrongdoing.

Báez was close associate of both Fernández and her late husband and predecessor, Nestor Kirchner, who was president from 2003-2007. The case began with allegations that Báez was paid for public works contracts that were never completed and that he then laundered that money on behalf of Kirchner and his wife.

Argentina's tax agency and anti-money laundering agency also agreed that Fernández, who remains politically powerful, should be removed from the case dating back to 2013. "Without an accusation, there is no possibility of a criminal process," Casanello wrote in his resolution.

Marijuan had said that while it is clear that there was a "close and direct personal relationship" between Báez and the vice president, that does not mean she was involved in the money laundering of an estimated 65 million dollars that led to Báez's conviction.

To demonstrate this relationship, Marijuan detailed that an investigation had found "at least 372 telephone contacts" between Báez and Fernández and her secretaries, showing "they were more than mere acquaintances from Santa Cruz and had a close connection."

Báez was the owner of Austral Construcciones, one of the main companies favored with public works contracts during the tenure of Fernández de Kirchner's administration as well as that of her late husband.

In an interview late last month, Marijuan said that he didn't find any "proof that links Cristina Fernández to this case." Analysts tied Marijuan's decision to an alleged friendship with Economy Minister Sergio Massa, widely seen as a possible presidential contender for the October election, Romero said.

President Alberto Fernández and Fernández – they are not related – have already said they will not be running for the presidency again and there is general uncertainty over who will be the candidate for the ruling coalition.
Cristina Fernández, who has long criticized the country's justice system as corrupt, once faced numerous criminal cases, but those have slowly been dissipating as judges rule there was not enough evidence to hold the former president accountable although those decisions are still subject to review by higher courts.

A court in 2021 dismissed a case against Fernández that accused her of conspiring with Iran to cover up Tehran's alleged involvement in a 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. That same year, a court dismissed a case that accused the vice president and her family of benefiting from a money laundering operation involving hotel rooms and real estate. Earlier, a case that had accused her of carrying out fraudulent operations through the dollar futures market was also dismissed.

The vice president is also facing accusations of wrongdoing in a separate case that claims she headed up a corruption network to award public works contracts during her administration

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Much as they did on Jan. 18, 2015, when the prosecutor's lifeless body was found in mysterious circumstances that launched a debate over whether he was murdered or took his own life, Argentines spent Jan. 1, 2020 glued to their screens, this time watching the Netflix series: Nisman: The Prosecutor, the President and the Spy.

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Nisman had accused then-President Cristina Fernández, her Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman, a lawmaker and four others of conspiring to lift Interpol's red alerts against a handful of prominent Iranians accused of involvement the 1994 bombing of Argentina's AMIA Jewish center, an attack that left 85 people dead. According to the prosecutor, Fernández's government may have negotiated impunity for the suspects with Tehran in exchange for resuming trade relations.

The day before he was to appear before Congress to provide details about his shocking accusations, his lifeless body was found in the bathroom of his apartment with a gunshot to his head and a 22-caliber weapon at his side.

Fernández, who is now Argentina's vice president, has denied covering up the perpetrators and said she played no role in Nisman's death. But the case remains unsolved and debate rages around whether he was executed or took his own life. A police investigation concluded he was murdered while Fernández's government suggested he took his own life.

Over six, hour-long chapters with dozens of interviews and testimonies, including current President Alberto Fernández – who is not related to Cristina Fernández – researchers, spies, FBI, and CIA agents and unpublished images, British director Justin Webster seeks to shed light on the case through the documentary.

The series quickly became the most commented topic on social media in Argentina and the president himself spoke to the media to address his statements in the documentary.

"To this day, I doubt he committed suicide," Alberto Fernández had said in 2017 in an interview with Webster that appeared in the documentary.

But on Thursday, Argentina's recently elected president seemed to change this position, telling local Radio Diez that "from 2017, when the interview was recorded, until now no serious evidence has appeared saying Nisman was killed."

"I'd like to know what happened to Nisman and if he killed himself, why?" he said.

In an interview with The Associated Press Thursday in Barcelona, ​​where he is based, Webster said he saw nothing strange in Alberto Fernández changing his opinion over the years. "It is completely natural for people to change their minds" as they get to know more about a case.

Alberto Fernández was chief of staff during part of Cristina Fernández's first term in office.

"When I interviewed him, he had no idea that he was going to be president. He was, as in the documentary, quite critical of Cristina [Fernández de] Kirchner. When I say critical I mean, I don't mean he was against her and he was able to say what was good about her and what was bad about her for instance," Webster said.

The spy referred to in the documentary's title is Antonio Stiuso, the former Argentine counterintelligence chief signaled by Cristina Fernández as the man behind Nisman's accusations as well as being behind his death as a revenge for having displaced him from office.

Describing both him and Cristina Fernández as "Shakespearean characters," Webster added that Stiuso is an "absolutely fascinating" man who was responsible for investigating the AMIA attack. He said that based on his close ties with the US and Israeli intelligence service he provided evidence that alleged Iran was the intellectual author of the attack and the Islamic group Hezbollah the executor. Iran has denied involvement.

Argentina's judicial system initially described Nisman's death as doubtful. But in 2017, when the probe moved to the federal system, investigators concluded it was a homicide linked to the investigation against Fernández's government (2007-2015).

Another judge continued the investigation of Nisman and formally accused Cristina Fernández, Timerman – who died in 2018 – and other former officials of participating in an alleged plot to cover up Iranian involvement in the attack. The case is still pending.

As Webster warns, Nisman's death occurred in a country strongly divided between Cristina's supporters and foes.

"And I think to the attentive viewer who watches all six episodes, then it does bring quite a lot of clarity to the big questions around the Nisman case, around AMIA, and around the memorandum case," he said.

"That's what makes it for me a particularly attractive story, that it's a psychological story about a single man and psychological stories, if you like, about two other sorts of Shakespearean characters, if you like ... But it's also got this international resonance that is, I think, very it's quite a revelation about how things work," Webster said.

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That announcement, along with the further achievements of Nisman's team that were to unfold over the next couple of years, marked a high point for the AMIA investigation. The investigation had only recently been reconstituted by the late President Néstor Kirchner following the ignominious collapse of the corruption-ridden probe launched by his predecessor Carlos Menem. Argentine Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corra issued arrest warrants for the eight, and the following year, Interpol, the international law-enforcement agency, published "red notices" – an alert sent to all Interpol member states with details of wanted fugitives – for five of them, along with an additional one for Imad Mughniyeh, the chief of staff of the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah.

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As Argentina mourned the 25th anniversary of the AMIA atrocity last week, joined by Jewish organizations and democratic governments around the world, the prevailing question in the air was, "Where are they now?

Two of the eight men named by the Argentine prosecutors in 2006 have since died. The former Iranian President Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, alleged to have called the meeting where the AMIA bombing was first conceived, left us in 2017, having amassed a personal fortune of $1 billion, and described admiringly in his BBC obituary as a "pragmatic conservative" who "sought to encourage a rapprochement with the West and re-establish Iran as a regional power." Imad Mughniyeh of Hezbollah died rather as he lived – in a 2008 car bombing in Damascus that brought to an end a terrorist career that included not just the AMIA bombing and the earlier bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, but also the 1983 suicide attacks on the US embassy and US Marine barracks in Beirut that took 350 lives.

Meanwhile, another of the Iranian leaders wanted by Argentina, Ali Akbar Velayati, now serves as a senior adviser on foreign policy to the Tehran regime's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (Strikingly, it was Velayati who attended Mughniyeh's funeral in 2008 as Khamenei's personal representative.) As for the five remaining Interpol red-notice subjects, they are not only alive and well, but have globe-trotted extensively in the meantime, visiting NATO member Turkey as well as Qatar, Pakistan, Oman, Brazil and 15 other countries, the great majority of whom have full diplomatic relations with the United States, the European Union and Argentina itself.

The bottom line, then, remains the same as it was on July 19, 1994 – one day after the AMIA bombing – when the center of Buenos Aires was strewn with rubble and smoke, and emergency services were pulling lifeless bodies from the wreckage.

No one, not a single person, has been tried and convicted for their role in Latin America's worst terrorist atrocity, in which 85 people died and more than 300 were wounded.

To add insult to that profound injury, the one individual whose integrity and dedication were never in doubt – federal prosecutor Nisman – was assassinated in 2015, a few hours before he was due to an unveil a complaint against former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her key aides for reaching an underhand agreement with Iran that would have exonerated the AMIA executioners. Like Velayati, Kirchner – who deliberately misrepresented Nisman's death as a suicide, and who may have even been involved in his murder – has remained in politics, protected from the clutches of the law by her parliamentary immunity as a senator, and presently running for election as Argentina's vice president on a ticket led by her former chief of staff, Alberto Fernández.

This is the scandalous background against which Argentina marked this most significant of all the AMIA anniversaries thus far. Politically, the most important consequence was the declaration of the Argentine government blacklisting Hezbollah – a "terrorist organization" that "continues to represent a current and active threat to national security and the integrity of the financial, economic order of the Argentine Republic."

This decision is the centerpiece of a broader effort by Mauricio Macri, Argentina's president, to lead a regional campaign against Hezbollah's financial heft and political clout throughout Latin America. The Western hemisphere has been a vital source of funds for Hezbollah – much of it from the trafficking of cocaine in concert with senior officers in the Venezuelan military – as well as fake documents and other prizes essential to the functioning of a terrorist organization. As a result, Hezbollah has a head start of at least a decade over Macri's counterterrorism initiative, but nevertheless, there is a renewed optimism that Argentina and its neighbors will begin implementing the legal tools to squeeze Hezbollah from their continent.

Equally, though, this latest burst of Argentine energy against Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors could come to an abrupt halt if Macri loses his re-election bid in October, three months from now.

Having presided over four years of bitter austerity policies, and with inflation currently climbing at 51% annually, Macri's popularity at home has collapsed. A government with Cristina Kirchner at its center is not an inevitability, but polling over the last few months shows that Macri will have his work cut out for him if he is to win a second term in office.

Should Argentina decide to subject itself to Kirchner's leadership again, it is very unlikely that she will turn the country's economy around. But what is certain is that Argentina will be saddled with a leadership that Western countries can never trust, in the most basic sense of that word, with counterterrorism strategy. If the core lesson of the AMIA bombing is to be finally applied, in the form of a concerted campaign to drive Iran and its proxies out of Latin America, then Macri needs to win in October.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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