Buenos Aires. The former president of Argentina Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) was prosecuted for allegedly having ordered the illegal spying, when he was head of state, on relatives of the 44 sailors who died in the sinking of the military submarine ARA San Juan in 2017, he resolved yesterday the judge in charge of the investigation.
Macri was accused of carrying out “prohibited intelligence actions as an author, by virtue of having made possible the production of illegal intelligence tasks, having generated the conditions so that data on people could be carried out, stored and used,” according to the 174-page ruling by federal judge Martín Bava.
The former president and main leader of the center-right opposition in Argentina will face the process in freedom, but the judge prohibited his departure from the country and seized him 100 million pesos (about $ 943,000 at the exchange of the day), according to the resolution .
“I have said that it is a political persecution that ends in this that we all already knew,” Macri reacted to the press in Chile, where he was upon learning of his prosecution, during a visit in his capacity as president of the Fifa Foundation.
For Luis Tagliapietra, plaintiff lawyer and father of one of the deceased crew members, the judge’s ruling “is forceful, very clear, very precise.”
“I feel very tired, I am exhausted, it is four years of fighting and we still have a long way to go. It is an important step that we took, but there is still a long way to go,” said Tagliapietra.
“I did not spy on anyone, I never ordered in my government to spy on anyone. I never saw any report of any family member of the ARA San Juan or of any other ship,” said Macri.
The ARA San Juan submarine, a 66-meter-long German-made TR-1700, disappeared in November 2017 with 44 people on board when it made the journey from Ushuaia (3,200 km to the south) to Mar del Plata (400 km to the south of Buenos Aires).
The complaint maintains that the relatives of the soldiers who died in the sinking of the ARA San Juan were subject to wiretapping and other interceptions by the Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI) during the year in which they sought to know the fate of the vessel and of the sailors.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx