Mauricio Macri returned to Argentina and must appear in court, charged with illegal espionage

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Former President Mauricio Macri returned to Argentina on Tuesday and must appear tomorrow in court in Dolores to testify in the case that investigates the spying on relatives of the deceased crew of the ARA San Juan submarine.

However, whether the former president will attend the court summons is unknown since his legal advisors have not confirmed his attendance.

On the other hand, Macri’s lawyer, Pablo Lanusse, went this morning to the Federal Court of Dolores, in charge of Martín Bava, to review the file. According to Infobae, he will meet with the former president this afternoon to define if he will attend the hearing or if they will ask for a new postponement of the summons.

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From abroad, Macri presented a lawyer last week and appealed his prohibition to leave the country, after Judge Bava, subrogating judge of the court of Alejo Ramos Padilla, prohibited him from leaving the country on October 1 and summoned him for questioning. Given this, the former head of state got the magistrate to agree to set a new hearing for tomorrow, October 20.

Despite the summons, Macri continued with his agenda abroad, which included presenting his book in Miami and his trip to Qatar to carry out his activities as executive president of the FIFA Foundation.

In addition, he was in the United States, where he accepted a proposal from The Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom of Florida International University to give classes on leadership.

However, Macri had already confirmed his willingness to appear before the courts, although he argued that the prohibition to leave the country “lacks any grounds, and therefore annihilates and violates the rights, principles, and guarantees of defense at trial, due process, minimum state intervention, free movement and transit, the principle of innocence, proportionality and reasonableness.”

THE CASE

The complaint made by the head of the Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI), Cristina Caamaño, in September 2020, corresponds to the period of 2017 and 2018 when Macri was governing the country and the ARA San Juan was still missing. It is believed that, at that time, the AFI followed up on the marches of the relatives and friends of the crew members of the submarine, at the order of the former president.

Thus, Macri was summoned as accused of ordering illegal espionage tasks and of having received many of those reports prepared by the AFI.

The charges allege that, from his position as President, “he has ordered and made possible the systematic performance of intelligence tasks expressly prohibited by Law 25.520 and its amendments, consisting of obtaining information, producing intelligence and storing data on people, due to their political opinion or their membership in a political party, social, trade union, community and Human Rights organizations.”

Other defendants, in this case, are the former heads of the intelligence agency, Gustavo Arribas and Silvia Majdalani, who have already been prosecuted for abuse of authority and violation of the law of internal intelligence, and, when they gave their statements in Dolores this year, they denied the charges against them.