Alberto Fernández, a necessary (metaphorical) autopsy

Now that thecivil death of the last of the Kirchnerist presidents(and until 15 minutes ago president of the Peronist party), Alberto Fernandez, has occurred, it is certainly useful to do the corresponding autopsy. While it is true that the fall down the precipice of the former president began already in the middle of his government, in the last week occurred the final crash to the ground. It is the noise made by this blow, when he was already a political corpse, what is most worthwhile to analyze. First, because it is not the same to die politically as to die civilly, the difference is striking. And second because he is a character forgotten for months in the inconsequence that can suddenly do so much damage and generate such a powerful shockwave of dung, that it is a political event from which no one can abstract.

The facts first: it all began as a black swan, arising from the case in which the former president is being investigated for alleged collection of commissions and influence peddling in the contracting of insurance for the State to his friend Héctor Martínez Sosa. These contracts would have been extended throughout his administration and, perhaps, would have begun to be designed during the 2019 campaign that took him to the Casa Rosada. That a Peronist president has corruption cases is more expected than wet water, so that, when the case became known in February, it did not draw particular attention. But in the case, evidentiary measures such as searches and seizures of telephones were ordered, and everything grew to the point of scandal when the content of the WhatsApp of María Cantero, secretary of Alberto Fernández and wife of Héctor Martínez Sosa, was revealed.

In María Cantero's phone were found messages from Fabiola Yáñez, partner of the former president, with dialogues of the former first lady with Fernández and photos where she was seen with un ojo morado y moretones en el brazo. The dialogues would have happened in mid-2021, when the scandal of the Olivos party occurred months before. On that occasion Fabiola had celebrated her birthday, very crowded, while the population suffered the quarantine imposed by her husband.

To the judge of the insurance case this changed the panorama, so he separated the material from Cantero's phone and called Fabiola Yáñez, who lives in Madrid, to file the complaint. As she did not want to, the court filed the section. But shortly thereafter a local media published the news and then Fabiola decided to talk to the judge and claimed to be suffering "psychological terrorism" and "telephone harassment" from Alberto so that she would not report him. The judge issued a series of precautionary measures: he prohibited the former president from having any contact with the woman and from leaving the country. In seven days Alberto had become the world's poisonous stain.

Soon the photos and chats where Fabiola asked Fernandez to stop hitting her went viral and the indignation exploded in the air, the prosecutor requested the secrecy of summary proceedings and asked for a raids Alberto Fernandez's apartment, where the police seized two phones, an iPad, 22 pen drives and two memory sticks. The crimes for which the former president will have to answer are several, depending on the moment in which they happened and other variables. It also remains to be seen the complicity of those who guarded the president and his family, as well as those who worked in the official residences, it must be determined if they could have hidden the facts inside the presidential residence as well as other offices and if Fernandez or other accomplices used their power to prevent justice from being served.

As misfortunes never come alone, videos began to leak from Alberto Fernandez's phone, some of which show him with a pro-Kirchner journalist, named Tamara Pettinato, in the presidential office of the Casa Rosada. In a hot and slightly bewitching dialogue between the president and Tamara, several "I love yous" and other phrases from Alberto's casanova acquis can be heard. During the quarantine, Tamara Pettinato visited the presidential residence along with other models, actresses and famous escorts, a fact for which they received complaints thanks to journalistic investigations, but seeing the parade of lust of the president who dictated pandemic moral classes; preventing people from working, being medically treated, studying or mourning their dead was too much. It was a foregone conclusion that the videos of Alberto's mistresses using the Casa Rosada as a space for sexual encounters would enhance the contempt that Fernandez already had.

In just one week, Alberto Fernandez went from having no political future to not being able to go out on the street. He buried himself in life, and gave the last push to a story that was tied with wire. Kirchnerism, the most modern version of Peronism, was an effective fusion between the new left and the statist corporatism of the middle of the last century. It was such a powerful power machine that it achieved four presidencies, infected the entire Argentine institutional-cultural system, exported its narrative to the world and sucked all the life, wealth and development it had at hand, in order to exist. All that very powerful construction of power was dynamited by the guy Cristina Kirchner, the head of Peronism, chose for being the man with the least capacity of self-management, she chose him for his insignificance, uselessness and submission. The paradox is remarkable.

Alberto was the founding partner of Kirchnerism, with more history within the Argentine political caste than Néstor Kirchner himself. That is why Néstor kept him as Chief of Cabinet during his entire term, he was an electoral eunuch who served for the lowest politicking. That is precisely why Cristina Kirchner anointed him as candidate for president, because of those qualities. He could be used and thrown away, he had no political value, transcendence, territory...or anything. She could handle him like a puppet by placing him as her vice-president. This is an old strategy of socialisms such as Brazilian, Russian, Cuban, etc.

But Alberto, in addition and if he was not allowed to speak, seemed normal and that for Kirchnerism was an upgrade. He represented the aspirational of academic seventies, revisited old leftist topos already rotten like Galeano's lines, Nebbia's songs, Guevara Lynch's ideas. And he was a professor, he vindicated the whole sixtiesayochist narrative of which global progressivism is the son and slave. His new companions, the boys of Puebla, of CELAC, of UNASUR thought that with him they were cleaning up the tawdry and crude image of Cristina, of Maduro, of Lula, of Evo. He also embraced the center center of the G20, or of Mercosur, it was not only Cristina who saw in him a good screen.

Cristina hoped that her puppet would serve, in addition, to maneuver in her favor in the multiple criminal accusations, but Alberto not only did not serve him, but the accusations began to turn into convictions. This affected Kirchnerism from within, which saw a fallible and impotent Cristina. A concatenation of failures that ended up hitting squarely on her famous story. Alberto assured the wokismo vernacular that he had fought the patriarchy and declared his feminism by creating the first Ministry of Women, while beating his pregnant wife. Kirchnerist feminism is now tearing its clothes off because of the former president's battering profile, but while he governed they were partners in the usufruct of positions and funds with the excuse of 'gender'. That convenience led them to turn a deaf ear not only to Fabiola but also to the people whom Fernandez had openly insulted, beaten and mistreated for years. Fernandez also spoiled the Kirchnerist 'narrative' built around human rights, when he separated families, disappeared and tortured people in the name of covidracy and looked down on a father who had to carry his dying daughter in his arms to try to seek a cure that Alberto denied him. Alberto was the perfect metaphor for the moral characteristics of Kirchnerism.

A matter that this minor man, prisoner of his vices, resentments and frustrations, lived in a place where he was not expected to reach, and for four years contributed, with significant contributions, to the extermination of Kirchnerism. His return to the public agenda with more and more evidences of his unfortunate existence also fully affects the Peronism he presided over until this weekend and a progressivism that embraced him, as it embraces lately anything that floats. The scandal will have collateral damage in other areas. In Spain his intimate relationship with the ruling PSOE and PODEMOS (or their second brands), in Mexico with his lavish closeness to López Obrador and MORENA, in Bolivia being the protector of the 'fugitive' Evo, are just some examples that everything he touched will be irremediably stained by his violence, his cynicism, his pestilence.

Fabiola Yáñez's denunciation sweeps away what was left of the masquerade and shows it as the stripping of the politicking that it is, laying bare the hypocrisy of all the socialism of the 21st century. Alberto represents the decline of a progressive narrative that until recently needed some patina of normalcy to validate itself. It was a funnel used for the moderates to swallow the woke garbage and finally serves to expose the delinquent fantochada they always were. Not only does it kill the Kirchnerist narrative, it marks the end of a political form that began with this century and that today is unsustainable. Because the disagreements of the socialist leaders around the Venezuelan electoral fraud, the overflowing anti-Semitism of the left woke, the rabid censorship of British Laborism or the senile decadence that governs in the name of the American Democratic Party are concatenated signs of the end of the buenista narrative. Today everyone, like Alberto Fernandez, has run out of arguments, everyone is out of control.