Former Salta national representative Emiliano Estrada has been indicted in a case where he is under investigation for using public funds finance a fake news campaign which the provincial government linked to activities related to drug trafficking. Until now, the former lawmaker had evaded formal charges through a labyrinth of arguments and errors.
Estrada, who belongs to La Cámpora and Unión por la Patria and was a member of the cabinet Juan Manuel Urtubey As Minister of Economy between 2017 and 2019, it was one of the many visits he received Cristina Kirchner at her 1111 San Jose apartment after her sentencing.
The former lawmaker had stopped by the Constitution Building with Urtubey in September and returned in November for the controversial photo with several economists that led to the judge’s decision to restrict the former president’s meetings.
His term as national MP expired on December 10th.
Although the investigation against him has been ongoing for months, the allegation was only made in the last few hours. At the beginning of the proceedings conducted by the public prosecutor’s office, three people, two of them former advisors to the then state legislature, were charged with the crimes of “abuse of office” and “embezzlement of services”. Then a fourth came along.
According to the allegation, Estrada instructed his advisers to create a series of videos with “dubious content” on the platform TikTok, with which the provincial government has been linked Activities related to drug trafficking. On this occasion, the prosecutor recalled that those who made the video carry out duties in the National Congress and that therefore The maneuver was carried out with resources from the nation state.
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Among his suggestions was that the then-MP had used legislative immunity in several incidents and argued that this was the case “A political persecution”. However, the attorney general maintained that the lawmaker retained his “shield of immunity” as long as the speech he was accused of was made on congressional premises or through the media.
Because Estrada instructed his advisers to create “these videos in secrecy” and anonymity, this benefit does not apply, investigative sources said.
Estrada is the fourth defendant in the case. They point to him as the intellectual author of the creation of a series of accounts on the social network TikTok with the sole aim of defaming people from the business, journalistic and political sectors of Salta and spreading false news about them.
In the case, two other defendants, Florencia Bustamante and Alonso Allemand, Estrada’s associates hired by the Nation’s Chamber of Deputies, explained that at all times he was the one who ordered the creation of the content, sent the scripts and validated the already edited videos that were distributed on three social network accounts: “La Casta Salteña”, “La Casta de Sáenz” and “Informante Salta”.
The other defendant in the case, Juan Capisano, was the creator of the “Casta Salta” profile and said he was an employee of media entrepreneur Federico Mena Saravia.
The decision to indict Estrada comes after a long legal journey that prevented the trial from moving forward for several months and that included judges declaring themselves incompetent, requests to consolidate with other cases and requests from two other judges, one of them Sebastian Casanellowho wanted to try the case in their own courts.
However, Judge Mariela Giménez of the Federal Court No. 2 in Salta, where the file was being processed at the time, rejected the requests and remained in charge of the case. Faced with this situation, Attorney General Carlos Martín Amad had tried to formalize the case, but encountered a new problem: Estrada did not appear at the hearingdespite notification.
That’s when the public prosecutor came asked the then legislature to lift his immunitywhich led to an appeal. It passed the Federal Court of Appeal without success, but then fell to Chamber I of the Federal Criminal Court, which granted the application.
Estrada’s defense then turned against Judge Giménez, accusing her of no longer being impartial. However, the proposal was rejected because The letter arrived too late.
This series of motions and court requests resulted in the formal charges, which had already been prepared in January last year, being delayed for almost a year. Finally, this measure was finalized in the last hours in a hearing in which Estrada listened virtually Reading the main facts studied.
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