Cristina Kirchner speaks for the first time since attack: “I am alive thanks to God and the Virgin Mary”

Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has spoken publicly for the first time since the attack she suffered on the 1st of this month, saying that she has remained unharmed thanks to God and the Virgin Mary.

“I feel that I am alive only thanks to God and Virgin Mary.”

“So if I have to thank God and the Virgin Mary, I want to do it among priests for the poor, slum priests, lay and religious sisters,” the Senate president said at a meeting with priests (from crowded neighborhoods) and religious and lay sisters.

Returning to democracy meant “recovering life and rationality, being able to discuss in politics what democracy had been since 1983, and eradicating this violence,” the Senate president said.

However, on the day of the attack, “there was a rift that we urgently need to rebuild,” she said.

The former president (2007-2015) said Pope Francis called her the day after the failed attack and told her that “acts of hatred and violence are always preceded by words and verbs of hatred and violence.”

“There have always been groups that were not in the majority, but small, but with great power, that wanted to suppress and eliminate dissenters,” she said.

In her speech, Kirchner called for a rethinking of how Argentines see themselves, rejecting the idea that a special law is needed to serve justice, because “the laws already in place are sufficient.”

Regarding the day of the shooting attempt, she stressed that it was the militants and not the police who arrested Fernando Sabag Montiel, the 35-year-old man who fired the gun inches from her face.

The former president also mentioned that two-time president Hipólito Yrigoyen (1916-1922 and 1928-1930) was the victim of an assassination attempt when a man fired five bullets at him but did not injure him.

Four people were arrested in connection with the investigation into the attempted murder of Cristina Fernández on September 1: Sabag Montiel, his girlfriend Brenda Uliarte, 23, and her friend Agustina Díaz, 21.

The day before, Nicolás Gabriel Carrizo had also been arrested, claiming to be the leader of a group of sugar flake traffickers, including Uliarte and Sabag Montiel.

Sabag Montiel is of Brazilian origin, although he has lived in Argentina since he was six years old, and has a criminal record for illegally possessing weapons.

Analysis of the cell phones indicates that the attack was planned, since Uliarte confessed to her friend Díaz on August 27, a few days before the failed attack, that she had ordered the murder of Cristina Kirchner.

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