Lessons on how to manipulate the truth.

* Originally published in Major Card

Space. Here is something that seems forbidden to President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner every time her government tries to eliminate vices and deviations that benefit the interests of certain groups. Laws approved by a majority in Congress are useless, judicial decisions are useless: there is a kind of reservoir of shields that prevent the government from undoing certain aberrations. 

To all this is added the constant efforts, on the part of the media, to confuse public opinion. Thus, it has been established that trying to dismantle a conglomerate that controls 56% of pay television in a country where more than 80% of households receive cable or satellite television is an attack on freedom of expression. Dismantling a murky business and reclaiming public space is an attack on property rights, in addition to spreading legal uncertainty. 

The case of the area and buildings occupied by the Argentine Rural Society in the upscale Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires exemplifies both the manipulation by the justice system and the distortion practiced by large media groups, gleefully followed by their Brazilian counterparts.

It is true that the space – a twelve-hectare public area, the Parque Tres de Febrero – has been occupied by the Argentine Rural Society since 1910. But it is also true that, until 1991, it belonged to the Argentine State.

For the grand exhibition commemorating the first centenary of the country's independence, pavilions were erected in 1910 and granted, under a temporary lease agreement, to the Argentine Rural Society. Indeed, nothing could be more natural: it was a time when large cattle ranchers dictated laws, rules, and political and economic policies. 

The temporary concession was extended indefinitely under each dictatorship, and the democratic governments that emerged in the intervals between coups preferred to leave everything as it was.

Throughout the 20th century, and without a single moment of distraction, the Argentine Rural Society always stood vigilant against anything that threatened democracy and the interests of the people in the country. This less-than-noble lineage was confirmed by the military coup of 1976, which established the most ferocious state terrorism ever known: the Minister of Economy, who destroyed everything in his path to favor specially chosen groups, was named José Martínez de Hoz. The first president of the Rural Society, founded in 1826 – exactly 150 years earlier – was named Narciso Martínez de Hoz. Forty years later, one of his sons, José Toribio Martínez de Hoz, refounded the Rural Society. A coherent family, as you can see.

But it wasn't because of her rigid tradition of anti-democratic conduct that Cristina Kirchner decided to reclaim the area. 

In 1991, then-President Carlos Saúl Menem, of infamous memory, privatized the park and buildings. He sold everything, by decree, to the Rural Society, in exchange for 30 million dollars (the National Tax Court had valued it at at least 63 million dollars; the Supreme Court's expert appraiser determined that the real value would be around 132 million). 

More than a father-to-son deal, it was a grandfather-to-grandson transaction: the Rural Society made a down payment of three million dollars, paid another seven million upon signing the deed the following year, and committed to paying ten annual installments of two million dollars starting in March 1994. It never paid another cent.

It's such a scandalous affair that even today, in addition to the leaders of the Rural Society, dozens of Menem government officials are being prosecuted, starting with Menem himself and his bizarre Minister of Economy, Domingo Cavallo, accused of embezzlement. 

Since impunity is inherent to the powerful, the Rural Society, until recently, never worried about its debt. On the contrary: while it paid nothing, it relentlessly tried to violate every Urban Planning Code it encountered. It even started holding car races in the space designated for fairs and exhibitions. The area occupied in the Palermo neighborhood, a privileged zone of the capital, became foreign territory. Instead of diplomatic immunity, it had oligarchic immunity.

The Rural Society says it hasn't paid what it owes because neighborhood associations in Palermo went to court and prevented the park area from being transformed into a gigantic shopping center. For years, the Attorney General's Office has been trying to collect the money owed, with the monetary adjustments stipulated by law, by every means possible. The Rural Society always manages to find lenient judges who grant injunctions. 

In 2011, Attorney General Angelina Abonna ordered a review of the presidential decree signed by Menem in December 1991. Cristina Kirchner took a year to comply with this order. She did so based on jurisprudence from the Argentine Supreme Court itself. 

The Rural Society appealed and lost in the first instance. It appealed to the infamous Civil and Commercial Chamber – the second instance, the same one that benefits Clarín with injunctions to avoid complying with the media law – and won. This Chamber is composed of two judges who traveled to Miami on more than one occasion at the group's expense.

The Chamber's argument is, to say the least, curious. It states that a sale made by the State cannot be undone by decree; the correct course of action is through the courts. This is the opposite of what the Supreme Court itself previously admitted. 

Furthermore, a question remains: a sale that is detrimental to the State from every point of view can be made by decree, but cannot be undone by decree? 

This is the story of what major newspapers here and there call confiscation. 

Furthermore, it's worth knowing who confiscated it: the president who sold a public asset worth at least double that for 30 million, received ten million, and left it at that, or the president who wants to recover that asset?