The Federal Chamber of Criminal Cassation rejected the request of Vice President Cristina Kirchner who insisted on aggravating the accusation for the members of the group Federal Revolution. Although at first, Jonathan Morel and the rest of those involved were arrested and accused of illegal association that sought to impose their ideas by force and fear in the days prior to the attack against the vice president, the Federal Chamber released and revoked that figure . He spoke of “incitement to collective violence”. And now the highest federal criminal court has endorsed that decision.
In a ruling agreed to by Infobaethe judges Daniel Antonio Petrone and Diego Barroetavena They maintained that the complaint “fails to adequately refute the absence of the objective assumption of admissibility that the appeals chamber indicated as an objection to the appeal filed.” And he stressed, in tune with the Federal Chamber, that “the questioned decision does not have the quality of a final sentence nor is it equated to it for its effects, and it is not about any of the records contained in art. 457 of the National Criminal Procedure Code (CPPN)”. He also cited jurisprudence that maintains that “decisions whose consequence is the obligation of the accused to continue subject to criminal proceedings do not constitute definitive pronouncements, since they do not put an end to the lawsuit or cause an assessment of impossible or insufficient subsequent repair.”
For his part, his colleague Carlos Mahiques He shared the criteria and stressed that “the complaint did not demonstrate the existence of a federal issue that would enable the competence of this Chamber as an intermediate court, according to the doctrine established by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation in Di Nunzio. Thus, Chamber I of the Cassation resolved “reject the complaint filed by the plaintiff, with costs.”
The Federal Revolution group came into the public spotlight after the attack on Cristina Kirchner. Brenda Uliarte, designated as a co-perpetrator of the murder attempt, participated in a torchlight march at the Casa Rosada on August 18 in front of the Casa Rosada. There her slogans were “to burst the Plaza de Mayo” and “demand resignations.” Rocks, stun bombs and Molotov cocktails were thrown. “To Kirchnerism, jail or bullet,” they proclaimed. The members of the group said publicly that they did not know Brenda. And the Instagram account of “@revolucionfederal” published: “We are going to persecute them, they are going to be afraid to go out. Theft and corruption in Argentina will stop being free by hook or by crook”.
Prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita and Judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi received the complaint and arrested on October 20 Jonatan Morel, Gaston Guerra, Leonardo Sosa and Sabrina Basile, members of the Federal Revolution group. Sabrina Basile is the daughter of the former technical director of the Argentine National Team. The Federal Chamber ordered their release, which generated repudiation from Cristina Kirchner as well as from President Alberto Fernández.
Later, Judge Martínez De Giorgi prosecuted them for taking carry out a criminal plan, consisting of imposing their ideas and fighting those of others by force or fear, using different social networks and mass media for this purpose” and thus agitated “a climate of social violence, whose most serious institutional act turned out to be the attempted assassination of the Vice President of the Nation, Dr. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, last September 1”.
The defendants appealed the decision. In general terms, they maintained that the fact that Revolución Federal sought to “impose its ideas” was not prosecuted because it was not even possible to specify what ideas they were talking about. They talked about right to protest and invoked the constitutional right of the freedom of expression where “they only demanded from the government a solution to the economic and social crisis that the country is going through”, for which they blamed the current authorities. For its part, the CFK complaint insisted on maintaining the prosecutions, insisting on the existence of a criminal plan by the group that persecuted government officials and had as a corollary the attempted murder of the vice president.
When resolving the issue, judges Leopoldo Bruglia and Pablo Bertuzzi They rejected that everything is part of free expression, without criminal relevance and they pronounced themselves to confirm the prosecutions but not by the figure of article 213 bis of the Penal Code. It is that, they said, Federal Revolution cannot be considered “an illicit association destined to combat ideologies”, beyond the fact that there were “extremist expressions and undoubtedly violent content.” against members of the National Executive Power and sympathizers of one or other political parties” or of “certain reprehensible actions of an offensive nature, such as causing damage or uttering insults and threatening phrases.” In a minority, Judge Mariano Llorens was inclined to dismiss the case for framing the case in freedom of expression. The vice president appealed this decision and sought to return to the classification of illicit association. That was now rejected by Cassation.
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