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Ted Cruz Calls for Sanctions on Iran-Linked Socialist Argentina VP over ‘Brazen’ Corruption

August 27, 2022
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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday urging the State Department to consider imposing sanctions, including a ban on entering America, on Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, one of the region’s most prominent leftists.

 

Fernández de Kirchner served 12 years as both president of Argentina and first lady alongside husband Néstor Kirchner, the president she preceded in office. During that time, she rose to prominence as one of the most influential far-left figures in Latin America, forging deep alliances with the most repressive regimes in the region. Fernández de Kirchner maintains the support of the regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, as well as far-left authoritarians such as former Bolivian President Evo Morales. Four socialist heads of state in Latin America – Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Bolivia’s Luis Arce, and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro – published a letter this weekend in support of Fernández de Kirchner despite the current allegations before her.

 

Fernández de Kirchner is currently facing 12 years in prison on charges of assembling a massive corruption scheme in which she allegedly hired associated contractors for public works projects for prices far higher than the projects were worth, then received part of the excess cash in the form of kickbacks. This type of scheme is common in leftist Latin American regimes and received the most international attention in neighboring Brazil, where “Operation Car Wash,” as it came to be known, resulted in the arrests of dozens of politicians from nearly every political party in Congress.

 

In his letter to Blinken, Cruz suggests that Fernández de Kirchner’s “increasingly brazen and now-public corrupt acts” pose a national security threat to the United States.

 

“Last week, an Argentinian Federal Prosecutor formally implicated Fernández de Kirchner in what he described as ‘the biggest corruption scheme ever known in the country,’ an elaborate bribery and kickbacks scheme that defrauded Argentina of billions of pesos during her time as president,” Cruz wrote, accusing the vice president of having “for decades undermined the rule of law in Argentina, convulsed its political institutions, and undermined American interests in the country and indeed the region.”


In addition to the corruption charges, Cruz noted years of suspicion that Fernández de Kirchner was involved in the mysterious 2015 death of the last prosecutor who tried to bring charges against her, Alberto Nisman. Nisman had uncovered evidence that Fernández de Kirchner had aided Iran in covering up its role in the deadliest terrorist attack in the Western Hemisphere prior to September 11, 2001 – the 1994 bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) – in exchange for a beneficial trade deal.

 

Police found a draft warrant for Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s arrest in Nisman’s trash bin alongside his body in January 2015, the day before he was scheduled to present his findings to Congress. Nisman died of a gunshot wound to the head. Forensics experts have pointed to extensive evidence that he could not have left the crime scene as it was had he killed himself alone, but leftist Argentine politicians have insisted that he committed suicide.

 

Fernández de Kirchner was president of Argentina at the time.

 

“Perhaps most notoriously, but certainly not exclusively, she is deeply implicated in the 2015 death of Argentine Special Prosecutor Alberto Nisman,” Cruz wrote to Blinken, “who was found shot in his apartment the day before he was set to present evidence to the Argentine Congress that would have proved Fernández de Kirchner colluded with Iran to cover up Iran’s role in the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual [sic] Israelita Argentina (AMIA) in Buenos Aires, the worst terrorist attack in Argentina’s history.”

 

“American adversaries – and in particular China, Russia, and Iran – exploit endemic corruption, including and especially corruption driven by leftwing movements in the Western Hemisphere, to advance their geopolitical agendas and erode American interests,” Cruz noted, urging the imposition of sanctions to ban the vice president from the United States.

 

Fernández de Kirchner has denied all charges against her, publishing a video statement this week insisting that prosecutors were trying to punish her and her late husband for the alleged great deeds they committed while running the country.

 

“No Argentine can say that he did not live better than now. And that he had not lived better than ever until that moment. That is why the prosecutor asks for 12 years. They are the 12 years of the best government that Argentina had in recent decades,” she said in the video.

 

In the immediate aftermath of Nisman’s death, Fernández de Kirchner similarly defended herself in a poorly drafted blog post declaring that she did not believe Nisman committed suicide and blaming anti-Iranian conspirators for the alleged murder. She claimed that the objective of the killing was to frame her.

 

“They used him alive and they needed him dead,” she insisted.

 

Alberto Fernández (no relation), the current president of the country, said at the time that neither he nor anyone in the country believed that Nisman had killed himself the day before presenting the biggest case of his life.

 

“Nobody in Argentina believes that Nisman committed suicide. Nobody,” he declared:

 

 

As president, Fernández has returned to the suicide theory, boldly stating on television this week that he also hoped that Diego Luciani, the prosecutor in the current corruption case against Fernández de Kirchner, would also not choose “suicide” before the ruling on her case.

 

“Consider the idea that what happened to Nisman could happen to Luciani,” the president said on national television, “which is that he committed suicide. Nothing else has been proven. I hope that Prosecutor Luciani doesn’t do something like that”:

 

 

Source: Breitbart

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