On September 1, 2022, . The bullet did not come out and Kirchner was unharmed, without realizing at the time that she had just been the victim of a failed attack. But the attack was recorded and the video quickly went viral. Three years later, the Federal Oral Court 6 of Buenos Aires sentenced the attacker, Fernando Sabag Montiel, to 10 years in prison for trying to assassinate Kirchner. His ex-girlfriend, Brenda Uliarte, received an eight-year sentence for being a “necessary participant.”
The court considered the guilt of both to be proven and unified the sentences of Sabag Montiel, who must serve a total of 14 years in prison for his previous sentence of four years in prison for selling child pornography videos.
The assassination attempt occurred in front of dozens of supporters of the former president who gathered daily in front of her home in Recoleta, a wealthy neighborhood in the Argentine capital. They gathered there to show solidarity with her in the final stretch of . Sabag Montiel, armed with a Bersa pistol, camouflaged himself among those who asked him for selfies and autographs for his book Sincerely until he is in front of her and triggers the gun at her. The bullet did not come out because it was not in the chamber.
The militants detained Sabag Montiel and handed him over to the police. The television stations that recorded the failed attack live also later showed how Brenda Uliarte secretly walked away from the scene.
The perpetrator of the attack confessed in court that his intention was to kill the former president. “Because it is corrupt, it steals and it harms society,” he justified in June. His speech was the same from the first moment. “I wanted to kill her,” he said in his pre-trial statement. Among the reasons he listed at that time for wanting to end his life was having felt “humiliated for going from being a person who had a good economic life to being a seller of sugar flakes” on the street.
That job as a street vendor, which he shared with Uliarte under the orders of Nicolás Carrizo, made the defendants known as .
Chats found on their phones revealed that it was not an improvised attack, but planned a couple of months in advance. “I’m going to go to Cristina’s house and I’m going to hit her with a cork (a shot). If it’s not me, it’ll be another sick person,” Montiel told his girlfriend in a WhatsApp message. She was not far behind. “Today I become San Martin, I’m going to have Cristina killed. I sent a guy to kill Cristina, I didn’t pay him, he’s also hot on her,” she wrote to a friend, alluding to her boyfriend.
The trial began in June 2024 and 157 witnesses testified in front of the court made up of judges Sabrina Namer, Adrián Grünberg and Ignacio Fornari. Unanimously, they decided to acquit Carrizo after both the Prosecutor’s Office and the complaint had withdrawn the accusation against him. In his final words, spoken hours before the verdict, Carrizo regretted having spent three years in preventive detention. “No one is going to give them back to me,” he lamented.
This Wednesday, when using his last words, Sabag Montiel pointed out that “the entire case was armed” and confusedly compared it to that of the death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman. Uliarte refused to use that right.
Kirchner’s lawyers tried unsuccessfully to advance the trial also in identifying the alleged masterminds of the failed assassination. “What has been left out has to do with different evidence that has emerged over these almost two years that could link people from the political sphere.”
On the first day of the investigation, the main defendant’s phone was deleted under unknown circumstances. “Today we have three people who were visibly involved, but not in the general context,” plaintiff lawyer Marcos Aldazabal stated at the beginning of the trial.
In August of last year, when Kirchner testified in court as a victim, he complained that the investigation had focused on the material authors of the attack and did not include “the intellectuals and financiers.” The former president maintains that they did not act on their own initiative, but rather that there was a “political paw” behind them for which justice has so far found no evidence.
