On Thursday night Silvina Heguy spent three hours at the door of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s apartment and surrounding areas and detected a sad silence. A wake with many journalists, she wrote in the editors’ chat. For a while we will remember where we were or how we found out about the moment in which Fernando André Sabag Montiel fired a gun in the face of the former president. Javier Cercas, in a monumental book, wrote about that watershed episode of the Spanish transition: the still photo of Colonel Antonio Tejero, on February 23, 1981, in his assault on the Spanish Congress as part of a coup that did not materialize . On Thursday night, in Recoleta, the crime did not occur either. Until now, the dominant hypothesis is that it failed due to the incompetence of Sabag Montiel. In the massive protest march on Friday, Mauricio Caminos collected, from the mouth of a protester, the most disturbing of the counterfactuals: if he killed CFK, we were going to a civil war. another protester gave it the title: “El 17 de octubre de Cristina”.
Sabag Montiel has been given a demonym that in this newspaper we try not to underline – that of Brazilian – and a condition of crazy loose that has not yet been proven by justice. A working life focused on renting taxis, a vocation to meet celebrities, a fondness for Death Metal, a body sculpted by tattoos used by neo-Nazis and changing states, consumption of Facebook pages on paranormal themes, a girlfriend dedicated to the trade of cotton candy and a best friend who stopped being a best friend and dedicated himself to evangelism made Victoria De Masi will dedicate a brief and urgent profile to Sabag Montiel and his girlfriend.
Alfredo Grieco y Bavio wrote about 30 years in Latin America on assassinations and attempted assassinations so that we dispel any attempt to seek an Argentine exceptionality. Responsible for the International section of the newspaper, Alfredo tells there that security is a central issue for Lula in the final stretch of the presidential campaign. His adversary, Jair Bolsonaro, was stabbed in the last campaign.
in your column Cristina Fernández and Hannah Arendt: politics and violence, Tamara Tenenbaum shares a sense of emptiness in the face of the tsunami of repudiation of the assassination attempt: many of them did not speak of the solidity of any democratic commitment. The repudiation of all and all has already been left behind and what appears is a new escalation of polarization (Juanjo Becerra maintains, in his column today, that polarization is a fiac term of consulting jargon). The opposition, in tension over this issue between soft liners and hardliners, is unable to unify positions. Gabriel Sued reveals the reserved dialogues between Christianity and the doves of Together for Change to isolate the hawks. Many of these leaders prioritize the electoral profitability of that furiously anti-Christian minority that disbelieves about the veracity of the attack and seem embarked on the short-term formula: them or us.
Pablo Ibanez describes a Front of All still in a state of shock over the assassination attempt on Cristina and has detected a new illusion in its leadership: that the electoral dispersion of Together for Change returns to Peronism the fantasy of a victory in 2023.
The national government has been left in the hands of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, for the political leadership and the reinvention of an epic, and the economy (and the uncomfortable and silent adjustment) in the hands of Sergio Massa. The functions of the president seem to have shrunk. If hate speech ends up becoming the new great umbrella of the Frente de Todos that explains everything -from Sabag Montiel’s incursion into Recoleta to prosecutors’ pleas passing through journalists’ editorials-, polarization will reach a higher stage. Martín Rodríguez, in his column Presidents don’t touch, has a proposal in the opposite direction: that the former democratic presidents take a joint photo and that they recite the Preamble of the Constitution. He also has a request for politicized minorities: “Go to the one we hate.” Almost a request compared to what happened on Thursday night. “We were millimeters away from ending the country we know,” he wrote.
In the last two months, Argentina has had three economy ministers, an assassination attempt on the vice president, and growth in inflation and poverty that were already at intolerable levels. As all crises generate greater demand for news (and our audience has grown), at elDiarioAR we have decided to be prudent and report what is happening as calmly as possible. The screams, however, are not indifferent to us.
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