CFK tests positive for COVID-19, Puebla Group Summit adjourned

CFK tests positive for COVID-19, Puebla Group Summit adjourned

Argentine Vice-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) tested positive for COVID-19 Thursday, after which all her engagements were called off and a gathering of Puebla Group leaders scheduled for later this month in Buenos Aires has been rescheduled, it was announced.

 CFK, who was sentenced to six years in prison on corruption charges last Tuesday, was reported to be in good health at her El Calafate estate in Patagonia.

After CFK’s conviction was known, the Puebla Group issued a statement expressing its “solidarity” with the former President in the face of the “shameful political attack, dressed up as a court ruling” that sentenced her to six years in prison plus a lifetime disenfranchisement.

Also Tuesday, CFK delivered a speech on live streaming in response to the court’s ruling, during which she sounded nasally congested.

This sentence “opens a new chapter in the legal warfare that has been developing in the region against progressive leaders” and in which ”the rights of the (Argentine) vice-president to due process, good name and the possibility of representing her people in free elections have been ignored,“ the Group said.

”Attempts have even been made against her life to the point of physically eliminating her“, he recalled and sentenced that the ”juridical wars dynamize the democratic spaces, yielding them to shady conspiracies of de facto powers that use justice for political purposes,“ it went on while calling on ”international human rights organizations to monitor the development of this process in its new procedural stages“ and inviting ”the Argentine people and its progressive forces to respond to these attacks in a unified and peaceful manner.“

Everything was ready for the Dec. 12 gathering at the CCK of former and serving Latin American presidents as well as other political leaders and scholars from the Caribbean, Spain, and Portugal.

Barring any new developments, the encounter will now take place on Dec. 19 under the title ”Popular Will and Democracy. From the military party to the judicial party, threats to democracy”. Everything indicates that the political and academic forum that brings together leftwing and progressive leaders of the region will convene on Dec. 19 at the CCK with round tables led by Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz, and former Presidents Evo Morales (Bolivia), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), José “Pepe” Mujica (Uruguay), and Ernesto Samper (Colombia), as well as former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.