“The impunity of the powerful” was one of the phrases that sounded the most yesterday in the Chilean Chamber of Deputies, which approved sending the right-wing president Sebastián Piñera to impeachment. It is an issue that puts the system at a critical point. The Argentine counterpart is Mauricio Macri. Piñera got the data in the Pandora papers and Macri in the Panama Papers. Zero intervention by intelligence services or media operations. But there is a difference. In Chile, 70 percent of the population agrees with Piñera going to impeachment. In Argentina, it was naturalized that a president had more than 40 offshore accounts of which are used to evade or launder.
It is a sinuous phrase. The Argentines who voted for Macri said that since he was a millionaire, he didn’t need to steal. In Chile there was a similar reasoning when Piñera won. The Panama Papers and Pandora Papers showed that this reasoning about the powerful could be exactly the other way around. Because power implies influence and impunity and therefore shady businesses can flow like water. In Argentina, in addition to the Panama, there are those negotiated with the Post Office, with the highways and with the wind farms, to name just a few of the open cases involving Macri.
It is not about a mysterious recording that they gave to a journalist from the stick when he was running through Palermo, nor the photocopies of a driver’s notebook that has more details than an accounting book, which was given to another journalist from the stick, nor the article of a journalist who does not put sources, but is closely linked to the embassy of a country interested in causing a conflict with a third country.
“Ending impunity for the powerful” is the enormous challenge of democratic systems. Cristina Kirchner is not part of that club. He is not even one of the most important businessmen in Santa Cruz. What is at stake against Cristina Kirchner is exactly the opposite: to show that there will be no impunity for those who interfere with the powerful.
Piñera and Macri, on the other hand, are in the club of the powerful. And it is likely that they have fallen into an operation against Cristina Kirchner by the vulture funds headed by Paul Singer. At least that is the suspicion of the origin of the leak that reached the Panama Papers to the International Corporation of Investigative Journalists. The idea was that they would find accounts of the Kirchners but instead dozens appeared in which Macri appeared.
The appearance of new “papers” has the form of a war between tax havens. But the data they reveal is very specific, indisputable, because their only protection was confidentiality, the secrecy they lost.
Macri’s voters detest corruption when they assume it is being practiced by their political opponents. But they naturalize the corruption of those they vote for. And the powerful that they vote denounce the corruption of others, but apparently, those who practice it the most are they because
By assuming their institutional roles, they put into play the enormous interests of their companies.
It is even nice. Macri put an unqualified person like Laura Alonso in the Anti-Corruption Office, who instead of warning him not to do business taking advantage of the position, suggested that he put figureheads in their companies. Macri had already set up his cousin Calcaterra, but with his fortune he invented a blind trust, which does not exist in Argentina. Obviously he was not that blind, because now he also has a lawsuit opened by that sighted trust.
The end of impunity for the powerful is another basic challenge for any democratic system. The entire institutionality of the system is in suspense due to this dilemma. Clearly impossible: There can be no democracy if we are not all equal before the law.
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