Democracy is not exhausted by the periodic holding of elections. It rests, above all, on the survival of the institutions that allow the will of the people to be freely expressed—and among these, none plays a more decisive role than an independent judiciary. When a justice system ceases to guard fundamental rights and begins instead to decide who may and may not take part in political life, democracy is quietly emptied of its substance, even as its outward forms are left standing.
I have said before that the proceedings brought against me point to something larger than my own circumstances. Here I want to dwell not on the injustice itself, but on what it reveals. What I have lived through is not an Argentine anomaly. It is the local expression of a phenomenon now visible across the Western hemisphere and well beyond it—one whose logic is strikingly consistent from country to country and whose consequences reach every citizen, whatever their political sympathies.
The past decade has produced a style of politics for which the United States has supplied both the template and the vocabulary. It is a politics of permanent confrontation, of contempt for institutional mediation, and of the conviction that a popular mandate licenses its holder to override the ordinary constraints of constitutional government. Its appeal has proved remarkably portable. In one country after another, leaders have adopted its slogans and its methods, each raising a national banner in the same colors—a “Make Argentina Great Again,” to borrow the phrase President Trump himself used, standing beside my country’s current president, whom he called “MAGA all the way.” Argentina’s own governing project is, without exaggeration, a local translation of that same movement.
There is nothing inherently alarming about the free circulation of political ideas across borders. What is alarming is the normalization that travels with them: the steady lowering of the threshold of what a democracy is expected to tolerate. And here the risk is not evenly distributed. In older democracies, thick institutional habits absorb some of the shock. In the younger and more fragile democracies of our region, where those habits are still forming, the same methods cut far closer to the bone.
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The mechanism is by now familiar. The leader who believes his mandate justifies any expedient will treat every institution that stands in the way of his reforms not as a legitimate check but as an obstacle to be removed. The judiciary is the first among these. Where it cannot be persuaded, it is pressured; where it cannot be pressured, it is captured or, failing
that is discredited. It is the capture of the referee, and its danger lies precisely in how lawful it is made to look. The modern autocrat rarely acts openly outside the law; he hides behind a veneer of legality, bending the instruments of the state to partisan ends while insisting that nothing improper has occurred.
Once the courts have been bent, they become a weapon, and the weapon has a name:
lawfare. Its purpose is to secure through litigation what cannot be secured at the ballot box.
— to remove an opponent from the contest, whether by disqualification, by conviction, or by the slow ruin of a reputation. Our region has become a laboratory for the technique. In
Brazil, whose proceedings later were recognized as gravely flawed, kept the country’s most popular leader in prison and off the ballot in 2018. In Ecuador, a former president was sentenced in absentia and barred from returning to public life. Elsewhere the courts themselves are simply replaced: in El Salvador, a president openly aligned with Washington removed the entire constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court in a single legislative session, and the reconstituted bench duly cleared his path to a re-election the constitution forbade. The particulars differ; the design does not. The aim is to neutralize the opposition so that power may be held even after the populist promise falters—for these movements, sooner or later, always run up against the distance between what they pledge and what they can deliver.
There is a further dimension that deserves to be named plainly because it is so often left unspoken. Women who reach the summit of political life are today more exposed to these methods than they were a generation ago, not less. The backlash against them is frequently gendered in ways that have little to do with any policy and everything to do with the fact of a woman holding power. Coordinated campaigns of gendered disinformation have become an instrument of that erosion—used to cast women leaders as untrustworthy, unstable, or
unfit for office, not as ambient prejudice but as deliberate strategy. One recent survey of women parliamentarians found that roughly six in ten had faced hate, disinformation, or image-based abuse. The progress of decades in advancing women’s leadership is more precarious than we like to imagine. Once blatantly sexist attitudes are normalized in public life, that progress can be undone with startling speed.
This is why I insist that my case is not, in the end, about me. It is illustrative of a trend, and trends of this kind do not halt of their own accord. If the erosion is permitted to proceed here, no one should assume this is where it will stop. And erosion is precisely the word. This is not the democracy-ending of the last century—tanks in the streets, a dissolved Congress, a single unmistakable moment at which the line is visibly crossed. There is no such moment. The institutions remain formally in operation; the alarm bells never quite ring. That is what makes this form of decline so insidious and so difficult to reverse. Once the very institutions on which the balance of power depends have been compromised, turning back the clock is far harder than preventing the damage would have been.
It was because I understood this that I chose to bring the conduct of my trial before the
United Nations Human Rights Committee—not as a litigant dissatisfied with a verdict, but to test whether the guarantees Argentina freely undertook under international law were honored. I ask for nothing that any citizen is not entitled to expect: an impartial and independent tribunal and a process worthy of the name.
Defending these guarantees is never merely an individual act. It is the defense of the right of an entire society to remain free—and of the far simpler proposition that in a democracy, it is the people, and not the courts, who decide who shall govern them.
“This piece was submitted on behalf of the author by Milton Advisers and Nazar Partners. Views expressed are the author’s own.”
