National Representative of La Libertad Avanza (LLA) Lorena Villaverde, who was unable to be sworn in as a Senator last Friday due to challenges to her nomination, yesterday withdrew the resignation that she had formally applied to her current seat, opening the possibility of her continuing in her current position in the Chamber of Deputies until the end of her term in 2027.
In a brief letter addressed to Speaker of the House of Representatives, Martin Menem, the liberal lawmaker requested the withdrawal of “the memorandum according to which I resigned from my position as a national representative.”
Villaverde was present last Friday at the preparatory session of the Senate, but she was forced to leave the building after the political forces reached an agreement to send the document to a committee to discuss there the moral ability or inability of the woman from Rio Negro to hold the position of senator.
The national lawmaker was challenged over her alleged links to Federico “Fred” Machado, a businessman linked to drug trafficking and extradited to the United States amid complaints that also linked him to former representative candidate José Luis Espert.
In this context, a journalistic investigation published by La Nacion newspaper, during the past few hours, revealed that Villaverde was arrested in 2002 in the state of Florida in North America, when she was trying to bring a kilogram of cocaine into that country.
Then a US court convicted her of drug trafficking, which cost her imprisonment in a federal prison. But she was later able to overturn the conviction and a new oral trial was presented against her, in which she was also able to be released from prison, and she then returned to Argentina, where she has remained since then, according to official judicial sources.
The accusation against Villaverde was closed in 2017, after fourteen and a half years of procedural paralysis. The Florida-based federal prosecutor’s office appeared before Judge Mary Scriven and formally withdrew the charges against him, taking into account the time that had passed.
With this criminal record, opposition pressure increased to prevent the current national representative from being installed in the Senate.
At the time of her arrest in the United States, Villaverde was 28 years old and had lived in Miami County since 1999. After 24 years, those around her confirmed that she had “no ties to drug trafficking.” They noted that it was “an unfortunate story that he had to live through” a quarter of a century ago, but that “aside from issues of political concern, there is no legal impediment to him assuming his seat in the Senate.”