After placing 400 new federal troops in Rosario, the Minister of Security, Aníbal Fernández, will appear this Thursday before the commission of the same name of the Chamber of Deputies to answer questions, while a law to strengthen the Federal Criminal Justice in Santa Fe is advanced. , with the agreement of all political forces.
Fernández will attend the Internal Security Commission, chaired by the massista Ramiro Gutiérrez, following the ruling party promised to hold an informative meeting under pressure from Together for Change, in the midst of the escalation of drug crime that led the national government to strengthen security in Santa Fe.
As this is Fernández’s first presentation in the House of Representatives, the opposition has accumulated all kinds of questions, ranging from Mapuche violence in the South to border care. However, the fight once morest drug trafficking in Santa Fe will take most of the meeting.
“There are many inconsistencies. It seems that the announcements are repeated, but there is no precision regarding what the effort is. And there are many doubts regarding the budget execution of the funds for internal security. Santa Fe is last in the execution of security funds per capita”, the radical from Santa Fe Juan Martín, vice president of the commission, warned this outlet.
This Wednesday, Fernández traveled to Rosario to commission another 400 federal troops, to reach the goal of 1,400 announced by President Alberto Fernández. “In this situation, it seems to be quite petty,” lamented Martín, who forced the minister’s visit in the last session.
Strengthening of Justice
Prior to questioning Fernández, deputies from the ruling party and the opposition signed an opinion on a bill agreed upon by the 16 representatives of Santa Fe. It was in a plenary session of the Justice and Criminal Legislation commissions, where there were crosses for the political responsibilities around the issue.
The initiative is in line with the delayed application of the accusatory system provided for in the new Federal Criminal Procedure Code, which puts the investigation at the head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and aims to simplify and expedite trials. The Code, approved in 2014, began to be implemented first in Salta and Jujuy, and the following provinces are Santa Fe and Mendoza.
For this, 27 positions of criminal federal prosecutor are created in the province, of which 15 will have a seat in Rosario, 7 in Santa Fe, one in Rafaela, one in Reconquista, one in San Lorenzo, one in Venado Tuerto and one in San Nicolás , province of Buenos Aires (border with Santa Fe).
Also, 9 positions of official public defender are created in those cities; 7 federal criminal judge with functions of guarantee; 6 federal criminal judge with review functions; and 2 federal criminal judge with enforcement functions.
The initiative had been presented since May of last year, but it had never been dealt with, which caused anger within the ruling party itself. In fact, the only deputy aligned with Governor Omar Perotti, Roberto Mirabella, denied a quorum in the last session of last year and threatened to leave the bloc.
“We began to have this issue on the agenda at the end of 2021, in a meeting of all the national legislators of Santa Fe with Governor Perotti. We worked for several months at a table with all the blocks to be able to arrive at a unified text”, highlighted Mirabella.
The head of the pro-government bloc, Germán Martínez (also from Santa Fe) ruled out that the treatment of the project is due to the shooting at the supermarket of Lionel Messi’s in-laws: “When it is said that this is the result of what happened last week, no I like that they put us in that place.”
“I don’t want to go into chicanas regarding why it wasn’t dealt with in December. What is happening to us in Rosario has not allowed Chicanas for ten years,” said Martínez.
Socialist Enrique Estévez warned that “if the institutions functioned properly, we should not be here dealing with this project,” and questioned the delay in establishing the Bicameral Commission for Monitoring and Implementation of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
Estévez recalled that the last time this bicameral met was in 2019 and blamed Vice President Cristina Kirchner, since to constitute the commission all that remains is to name the senators (the deputies have already been nominated).
From La Cámpora, Marcos Cleri criticized in harsh terms the visit of opposition leaders to the province, such as Horacio Rodríguez Larreta last weekend. “Electoral political tourism is a carancheo that we request that they stop doing, because with security there is no speculation, they work every day to defeat organized crime,” he launched.
The radical Ximena García, also from Santa Fe, came out at the crossroads. “We worked for months without any political speculation on a common project,” she clarified, and following questioning Cleri’s “lack of respect” she pointed out once morest “the negligence of the national and provincial government.”
The debate lasted almost three and a half hours and now the treatment remains in the Budget and Finance Commission so that voting in the venue is enabled.