Cristina Kirchner accused her successor Mauricio Macri in media blackout scandal

The former President of Argentina and current Vice President, Cristina Kirchner, implicated former President Mauricio Macri and the Panama Papers in the squeeze imposed on Argentine judges to put Kirchnerist administration officials in prison during the previous administration, as revealed by journalist Carlos Pagni.

On his program Odisea Argentina, broadcast Monday by LN+, the La Nación newspaper columnist said that the outlet was aiming to publish a photo of all the federal judges on a Sunday cover in April 2016, a few months after Macri's inauguration, to hold them responsible for the "impunity" of Kirchnerism.

"As a result, several judges thought they should produce a news story to distract from that cover, and they put Ricardo Jaime in jail. The public opinion and the press is what made the judges overreact with the preventive detentions [of Kirchner administration officials], that now in many cases we see them as an aberration. This thing that Cristina Kirchner calls lawfare is the other side of the impunity that her own team enjoyed when they were in power," Pagni added.

"Finally, it is La Nación, through one of its leading columnists, which half describes some of the scandalous mechanisms of Lawfare without a single hair being moved in the Supreme Court, which is ultimately responsible for the Judiciary."

Cristina referred to Pagni's revelations through an extensive Twitter feed. "A well-known journalist has just informed us' (of course four years later) that in 2016 the newspaper La Nación was about to dedicate a Sunday cover to the judges of Comodoro Py who had not persecuted' officials of our governments," the vice president published.

"They say that a half-truth is a lie and it turns out that what the well-known journalist did not tell is that precisely on that Sunday, April 3, 2016, when the famous cover with the judges of Comodoro Py [a popular nickname of Argentina's judicial branch] was supposed to appear, it was the same Sunday that the Panama Paper's scandal in which then President Mauricio Macri was directly involved was going to be known worldwide. That's why Judge Ercolini, the day before, ordered the arrest of the former official," Cristina said from her Twitter account.

"The complete truth is that they either put a former official in jail or published the cover with the judges' photo. The objective was the same: to cover up and conceal Macri in a scandal that provoked the resignation of presidents, prime ministers and ministers around the world," the Vice President said.

"Now that things are beginning to be exposed and the mechanisms of the persecution of opponents and the cover-up of corruption in the Macri administration are being laid bare, it is easier to understand the need to put Justice back on the path that the Republic is imposing on it."