Buenos Aires Herald 
Former President Cristina Kirchner confirmed she will surrender to authorities on Wednesday, June 18, in a post published early Friday on social media platform X. In her first public statement since the Supreme Court confirmed her six-year prison sentence and lifelong ban on running for public office on Tuesday, Kirchner also justified her request for house arrest and took a swipe at the court and her political opponents.
“The puppet triumvirate that acts as a fiction of the Supreme Court obeyed the order given by economic powers to ban me and put a clamp on the popular vote,” Kirchner wrote. She added that she is not like the “right-wing mafia that dodges court orders and goes on the run for 3 years” and that she will comply with the judiciary.
The barb was directed at Fabián “Pepín” Rodríguez Simón, a former advisor to ex-President Mauricio Macri who fled to Uruguay in 2021 as the judiciary moved forward in an investigation against him and other members of the Macri administration. Federal Judge María Servini called him in to testify, but Rodríguez Simón failed to appear and was declared a fugitive from justice.
With Milei in power, he returned to Argentina in November 2024, after the judiciary granted his request that he not be arrested. He has been questioned by Servini for allegedly ordering then-Indalo Media owners Cristóbal López and Fabián De Sousa to back the Macri administration under the threat of economic consequences. Rodríguez Simón has denied any wrongdoing.
In her post, Kirchner also said that her request for house arrest is related not only to institutional protocol but also to “reasons of strict personal safety.” As a former two-time president, she said that it is “mandatory” that she have full-time protection for the rest of her life. In her case, she explained, there are additional security concerns in light of the assassination attempt against her in 2022.
“The extremely serious assassination attempt failed […] due to a true and authentic miracle I will always thank God for,” she wrote. Kirchner added that while the material authors are being tried, the “judicial party has refused to look into the intellectual masterminds and economic support” of the crime.
Cristina Kirchner was greeting her supporters outside her home in Buenos Aires at around 9 p.m. on September 1, 2022, when a man named Fernando Sabag Montiel snuck through the crowd, pointed a gun at her face at point-blank range, and pulled the trigger. The gun did not go off, and Montiel was arrested on the spot.
Editorial disclaimer: The Buenos Aires Herald is part of Indalo Media
