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Secretary of state Marco Rubio announced on Friday that Argentina’s former leftwing president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had been barred from entering the US over her involvement in “significant corruption”.
Rubio’s move against Kirchner comes amid a broader crackdown by the Trump administration on immigration and efforts to target leftwing opponents of the US president both domestically and internationally.
He also banned Kirchner’s longtime planning minister, Julio de Vido, from entering the US, as well as members of their immediate families.
Rubio, a former Florida Republican senator whose parents were Cuban immigrants, has been a longtime critic of leftwing political figures in Latin America.
“[Kirchner] and De Vido abused their positions by orchestrating and financially benefiting from multiple bribery schemes involving public works contracts, resulting in millions of dollars stolen from the Argentine government,” Rubio said in a statement, adding that “multiple courts” had convicted the Argentine leaders for corruption.
The former president was sentenced to a six-year prison sentence and a lifetime ban from public office on fraud charges in 2022. An Argentine appeals court upheld the conviction last year. Kirchner is expected to take her appeal to Argentina’s supreme court.
Kirchner remains the most influential leader in Argentina’s large left-leaning Peronist political movement, the main opposition to libertarian President Javier Milei. She is a deeply divisive figure in the South American country.
During her 2007-15 presidency Kirchner pulled Peronism sharply to the left and dramatically expanded the size of Argentina’s state. She then served as vice-president in the 2019-23 government.
Milei was elected in late 2023 amid anger at an inflation crisis triggered by the Peronist government’s printing of money to fund its spending.
Kirchner said in a post on X that the announcement by the Trump administration was motivated by its alliance with Argentina’s rightwing politicians, including Milei and former president Mauricio Macri, who the US president helped to secure a $57bn loan from the IMF in 2018.
“He still can’t get over the fact that we beat [Macri] at elections in 2019,” she said, adding that the sanction was “[clearly] a request by [Milei]”.
She called on her supporters to join a march on Monday, the anniversary of Argentina’s 1976 military coup, “since they never banned [Argentina’s military junta leaders] from entering the US”.
The state department rarely bans former or current international political figures from entering the US, and usually only in exceptional circumstances, such as the Biden administration’s steps to stop Russian politicians from entering the US after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Rubio’s move represents a warning shot to other leftwing political leaders around the world that they could face similar measures if they are in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
It came as Washington is weighing a sweeping new travel ban on citizens from as many as 40 countries, including Venezuela and Iran, that would be much broader than the measures barring citizens from some Muslim majority countries implemented during Trump’s first term.
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