The corruption trial of Argentina’s former president, Cristina Fern\u00e1ndez de Kirchner, has begun in Buenos Aires.<\/p>\n
Ms Fern\u00e1ndez is accused of accepting bribes from construction firms in exchange for lucrative government contracts while in power.<\/p>\n
This trial, the first of 12 cases Ms Fern\u00e1ndez faces, comes days after she announced she was running for office.<\/p>\n
Posting on Twitter ahead of the trial, she dismissed the accusations as a politically motivated “smokescreen”.<\/p>\n
“Trials must seek the truth,” she wrote. “But it doesn’t look like this is going to happen here.”<\/p>\n
Ms Fern\u00e1ndez, a left-leaning populist, is standing for the vice-presidency in the country’s national election on 27 October.<\/p>\n
Her attendance at the opening hearing at the city’s Comodoro Py court was mandatory, but she will be able to send a representative to the follow-up hearings held every week.<\/p>\n
Demonstrators gathered outside the courthouse in Buenos Aires on Tuesday to shout slogans in support of the former president.<\/p>\n
Ms Fernandez, 66, was president of Argentina for two terms, from 2007 until 2015.<\/p>\n
She is now accused of having given preference to her friend, a businessman called Lazaro Baez, for road construction contracts in southern Argentina’s Santa Cruz province during that time.<\/p>\n
She said on Twitter the trial was to “distract Argentines… from the dramatic situation in which our country and our people live” – referring to Argentina’s fragile economy.<\/p>\n
“It is a new act of persecution, with a single objective: to place a former president opposed to this government on the defendants’ bench during a full presidential campaign,” she wrote.<\/p>\n
High inflation and a weak Argentine peso have led to increasing social unrest and unemployment in the country.<\/p>\n
As a result, and despite the accusations against her, Ms Fern\u00e1ndez continues to poll favourably as Argentines live through the austerity measures implemented by President Mauricio Macri.<\/p>\n
Ms Fern\u00e1ndez was expected to stand as a presidential candidate in the election, but on 18 May announced she would run for vice-president instead.<\/p>\n
She will run alongside her former chief-of-staff, Alberto Fern\u00e1ndez, who is seeking the presidency.<\/p>\n
“I have asked Alberto Fern\u00e1ndez to lead a team that includes both of us, him as the presidential candidate and me as candidate for the vice position,” she said in a nearly 13-minute long video on her official Twitter account.<\/p>\n
Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"