Espionage scandal involves the government of former president Mauricio Macri.

Rebuildables - During Mauricio Macri's administration, Argentina's Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI) allegedly set up an illegal espionage scheme targeting opposition figures, religious leaders, journalists, and social organizations. The current Vice President of the Republic, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and her daughter Florencia were also targeted by the scheme. The president of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, equivalent to the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court, was another person spied on.

According to the AFI, now under the government of Alberto Fernández, 403 journalists were investigated. In total, the espionage scheme involved 1.500 files, making use of photos, videos, and audios about politicians from different sectors, church leaders, journalists, and social organizations.

According to the newspaper Página12, the "incredible" accusation came from the confession of a "very powerful" drug trafficker in Almirante Brown, a department in Argentina located in the Chaco province. According to the newspaper, the espionage scheme involved police officers, lawyers, journalists, drug traffickers, and 'barrabravas', as the violent organized fan groups that attend football matches in Argentina are known.

From Mendoza, a city in western Argentina at the foot of the Andes, researcher Rogério Tomaz Jr. said in a YouTube post that the fake news network in Argentina, fueled by espionage, is similar to the "Hate Cabinet" in Brazil, led by Rio de Janeiro city councilman Carlos Bolsonaro (Republicanos).

In addition to fake accounts and bots in favor of President Macri, the network had "a series of strategies learned since before 2015." According to Thomaz Jr., Cambridge Analytica had been in the country since 2015. The company provided services to the military sector, advised US President Donald Trump, and operationalized the strategy of disseminating "political messages" in service of far-right causes, in the campaigns of Trump himself and the Brazilian president Bolsonaro, who used Bannon's methods on a large scale.

The Argentine espionage scheme also "supplied" the press with audio recordings of Cristina Kirchner's informal conversations, "with the aim of exposing the former president," said Thomaz Jr.

According to the newspaper La Nacion, former president Cristina and the mayor of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, were in the courts of Lomas de Zamora, accompanied by lawyers, this Wednesday (10), to learn about “the intelligence material that would have been produced against them under the orbit of the AFI during the Macrista government”.

Researcher Javier Tolcachier, from the World Center for Humanist Studies, wrote to the Baron of Itararé that the information about journalists included “not only possible dissenting voices and those critical of the government, sympathetic to the opposition or the 'anti-globalist' movement, but also many journalists from media outlets that practiced a veritable 'media shielding' of the Macri government, such as the Clarín group, La Nación, and Infobae.”

“Beyond the necessary trials, history has already delivered its verdict: the Argentine people raise their voices and demand 'never again!' to this type of practice and its perpetrators,” wrote Tolcachier.

Mauricio Macri came to the presidency of Argentina after a campaign in which he stated that the goal was to bring the country to "zero poverty." At the end of his term, the Argentine National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC) showed that Argentina had at that time the highest poverty rate of the decade, 35,4%.