The deadly bite of the black widow

It may seem a coincidence, but the great judicial enemies of the current Argentine vice-president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK), have the bad luck to die murdered or victims of terminal cancer. The last on the list, Fabián Gutiérrez, had been the former private secretary of CFK, at first when as First Lady she also had an office in the Casa Rosada and her own agenda independent of that of her husband, President Néstor Kirchner, and later when she was already president for two successive terms.

Gutiérrez's body was found brutally beaten and his throat slashed, all allegedly the work of four young men between the ages of 19 and 23, all of whom were arrested almost immediately and accused, after a skilful and quick interrogation, of the crime of murder under the pretext that they wanted to extort money from the victim. Gutiérrez had retired to his luxurious mansion in El Calafate after CFK left the Casa Rosada, but in 2017 he was arrested for money laundering. His confession before judge Claudio Bonadío was so detailed that the magistrate granted him protected witness status. In that statement, the former secretary of CFK described the dozens of times that important people visited the Government Palace carrying wallets and backpacks full of cash, especially US dollars. He also reportedly told the judge about the weekend trips that both Néstor and Cristina, and later the widowed president, made to their own residence in El Calafate, taking with them these monumental amounts of money, which they allegedly stored in that house, "in whose basement behind a white door" he would have seen such loot introduced.  

Bonadío opened this dossier under the name of "Cuadernos", which was gradually added to by the statements of numerous real estate entrepreneurs, who admitted before the judge that they had thus paid for the signing of contracts with the State for the execution of public works or for permission to erect all kinds of buildings and adjacent equipment.  

But Bonadío left this world last February 4, after a brain tumour surgery months before, when he already had up to fourteen cases against Argentina's new vice president, enthroned alongside President Alberto Fernández, who won against Mauricio Macri in the last elections. Since then, these legal cases have been declining as if by magic, as well as the police protection enjoyed by the "repentant" witness Fabián Gutiérrez, who had no bodyguards to facilitate his throat-cutting and subsequent passage to the afterlife, without any apparent logical explanation.  

Bonadío and Gutiérrez are allegedly victims of CFK, whom the opposition media call the black widow, in allusion to the spider Latrodectus mactans, of unjust bad reputation, since its bite is not usually as lethal as it is attributed, except of course among young children and the elderly. The case is that the black widow with an office in the Casa Rosada is also linked to the death of the prosecutor Alberto Nisman, found in the bathtub of his house, shot in the head, on January 18, 2015. Police and media very close to Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner rushed to classify that unfortunate event as a suicide. It was very strange, however, that the prosecutor took his own life after announcing that a few hours later he would appear before Congress to show the evidence incriminating the president for covering up the authors of the biggest attack in Argentina's history, the one carried out with a truck bomb against the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA), on July 18, 1994. The explosion of the building caused 85 deaths and more than 300 injured.

Nisman is said to have obtained evidence that CFK concluded a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Iran to avoid the demonstration in court that the attack had been ordered from Tehran, and the incrimination of five high-ranking officials of the Iranian regime.  

A documentary by José Antonio Guardiola, broadcast on TVE's program "En Portada", a finalist in the Monte Carlo Festival, would be the first contribution that would compile in audiovisual format the investigation, the conscious destruction of evidence and the multiple indications that Nisman's death had only CFK and the Ayatollahs' regime as beneficiaries. Now, a Netflix mini-series, "Nisman: The Prosecutor, the President and the Spy", delves into that evidence with numerous testimonies. Especially interesting is that of the current president of the nation, Alberto Fernández. When recorded in 2018, this professor of criminal law doubted that Nisman had committed suicide. He also described the Gendarmerie's report as "absurd", according to which Nisman was killed by two people who drugged him with ketamine, threw him in the bathtub and shot him in the temple.  

Lost in some unknown fold of the spider's web, after Nisman's death, the remains of DNA obtained by the FBI from the rubble caused by the truck bomb have also disappeared. According to American intelligence, these remains would confirm that the driver of the vehicle was the Lebanese Shiite Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a member of Hezbollah, Iran's armed wing in Lebanon.  

The answer to all the questions remains in the hands of Kirchner's widow. Unless, of course, it is just a cascade of unfortunate coincidences.