MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

CFK insists there is a proscription on her running for office

It is not against me, it is against Peronism,” CFK argued during the opening of the Diego Armando Maradona sports center in Avellaneda

Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) insisted there was “neither resignation nor self-exclusion” on her part because “here there is proscription,” which is why she claimed she would not be running for any office in 2023.

CFK made those remarks during the opening ceremony of a municipal sports center in Avellaneda named after the late football legend Diego Armando Maradona in the southern outskirts of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA).

Although convicted for corruption earlier this month and disenfranchised for life, her sentence is still open to appeals and until they have been exhausted there is no actual ban on her becoming a candidate.

Joining CFK at the ceremony were Buenos Aires Governor Axel Kicillof and Avellaneda Mayor Jorge Ferraresi.

The former two-time president said the event reminded her of her late husband Nestor Kirchner's mayoralty in Rio Gallegos: “Nestor started to build sports fields and gyms all over the city, because over here kids can play in an open-air field, but not in the south with the wind and the cold. The truth is that the sports experience needs a lot of infrastructure.”

Then she referred to her alleged “resignation and self-exclusion” after her Dec. 6 message following her conviction. “From one side they started to talk about Cristina's resignation and from other sides about self-exclusion,” she stressed. “Let's speak clearly, here there is a proscription,” she insisted.

She also argued that the trial against her had been set up “with precision and an almost surgical electoral chronology”.

“I did not resign, I announced that I was not going to submit our political force to take as candidate someone who would be told 'she is condemned,' and in this way be absolutely functional to what they want. It is not against me, it is against Peronism,” she went on.

CFK also called the people to mobilize on March 24, 2023, when 40 years of democracy will be celebrated: “It will be a very important date for us to mobilize the whole of Argentina based on a slogan 'Argentina and democracy without mafias, we Argentines deserve it'.”