Welcome to lawfare

“Welcome to Lawfare: A Basic Steps Manual for Demolishing Criminal Law,” a recently published book by Capital Intelectual, was co-authored by Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, Judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights; Cristina Caamaño, former prosecutor and head of the Federal Intelligence Agency in Argentina; and Valeria Vegh Weis, professor and researcher at CLACSO-UBA. The afterwords are by sociologist and political scientist Atilio Boron and Eli Gómez Alcorta, Argentina’s first Minister of Women, Gender, and Diversity. Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a quintessential victim of lawfare, wrote the following foreword:

“The authors, three renowned professors from the Faculty of Law of the University of Buenos Aires, through the writing of a “Manual of Basic Steps to Demolish Criminal Law”, managed to analyze in depth a phenomenon that, despite being worldwide, has been developing systematically and with an undesirable frequency in America Latin America: the use of the judiciary, especially with regard to the application of criminal law, to interfere in politics.

This is lawfare, a legal war with illegitimate aims. as my lawyers argued in 2016. The elites of our region and the defenders of the interests of capital international financial institutions, which they have been fighting for decades social policies designed to eradicate poverty and to reduce the deep social inequalities, which have This is to promote corruption to the category of “cosmic evil”, pointing to it as the origin and cause of all the evils. Of course, nobody approves of having rulers. corrupt. But the fight against corruption is nothing more than the pretext that those sectors use to attack governments legitimately elected by popular vote.

The courts have become the arena where those defeated at the polls seek to impose their own interests over popular sovereignty. Through this means, certain sectors of the judiciary and various bodies within the justice system, with the opportunistic support of the mainstream media, have turned to attacking popular governments concerned with defending national interests. Their objective is to criminalize and destroy politics, attempting to instill in society the idea that all politicians are corrupt. Since the physical destruction of the adversary is no longer considered appropriate in these times, what is desired is their legal and political demise.

Under the guise of fighting corruption, they violate the legal principle of due process and the constitutional guarantees of the accused. As the authors of this book point out, the series of cases that have occurred in various countries of our region consistently demonstrate the same method: a politically involved segment of the press fabricates a story and widely disseminates it (a lie repeated a thousand times eventually becomes accepted as "truth"); relying exclusively on this fabricated news, the judicial police open an investigation; the Public Prosecutor's Office searches for evidence to formally support the accusation; even when no evidence is found, the case is often pursued, as happened in Brazil, under the assertion that "I don't have proof, but I am convinced." Then, all that remains is to "identify some judges willing to cooperate," either because they see the longed-for opportunity for stardom or because they envision a concrete personal advantage. The private lives and privacy of the accused are exposed daily through so-called "leaks," a term used to disguise the operation of shrewdly selecting one or more facts and intentionally transmitting them to media "colleagues," especially on television. Faced with the impossibility of proving what did not happen, illegal wiretaps, coercive summonses, and preventive detentions are used, both of the accused and their families. These are the mechanisms employed to achieve the goal of obtaining a "rewarded plea bargain" from the "repentant" (as those "capable of fabricating any situation to obtain a benefit" are called in Spanish-speaking countries), for whom the "reward" is freedom itself and, at least in Brazil, the chance to keep a good portion of the proceeds of the confessed crime. Thus, the incriminating confession is extracted, even without the slightest proof, and the accused is condemned in a trial based solely on evidence. If the alleged act cannot be proven, the absurd category of "undetermined act" is invoked. The charade is completed with the guilty verdict, which will be confirmed by a court equally biased and beholden to the political and economic interests of the ruling classes.

This is how the legal conditions are ensured to imprison the enemy and prevent them from participating in political life. The mainstream media, with television leading the way, relentlessly broadcast the court ruling, ready to legitimize an entirely spurious process. With the enemy removed from the political arena, the path is cleared for the election of men and women in government beholden to market interests, who neglect to protect the population, especially the poorest. National sovereignty is violated through the sale of large public companies, always auctioned off at prices far below their true value, in transactions that reveal a profound disregard for the environment and so many other basic rights of the population.

Purchase the book from Capital Intelectual publishing house