Pressure to resign, threats of physical violence and even accusations of espionage are some of the ingredients that at this time are making the scandal of the libertarian intern in Deputies grow and that led to Marcela Pagano, one of the members of Javier Milei's bloc and president of the Impeachment Commission, to end up hospitalized due to a spike of stress that caused a bleeding ulcer.
As confirmed by
Clarín
, the deputy will continue to be hospitalized in a clinic awaiting the results of the studies that were carried out to determine the origin of the condition that put her state of health in crisis. All, a week after the fierce internal conflict that was unleashed by his appointment to the Impeachment Commission of the Lower House, one of the key areas of legislative management, in which he assumed the proposal of the then head of the block Oscar Zago, with the “ok” of the President.
Zago, it is known, ended up being removed from the leadership of the deputies of La Libertad Avanza and Gabriel Bornoroni from Córdoba took his place. Martín Menem, in parallel, ignored Pagano's election and called a new meeting to elect authorities on the commission, but then had to postpone that call, dated for today, due to the hospitalization of the journalist and current president of Impeachment.
In the midst of all this, the complaint of pressure within the bloc to obtain Pagano's resignation from the commission became vox populi in the halls of Congress. Bornoroni sought to deny it:
“Let's not say that, it's not like that
,” he said when asked by the IP channel about the complaints from the journalist's environment about the pressure.
The president of the LLA block of deputies, Gabriel Bornoroni, told @_IPNoticias that he contacted Marcela Pagano, who is hospitalized: "I am a friend and I spoke with her." He denied that there are "pressures" for him to leave the presidency of the Impeachment Commission: "It is not like that" pic.twitter.com/iKVZW3k0mc
— Nicolás Gallardo (@nicogallaok) April 18, 2024
Before the hospitalization, there was a telephone conversation between the deputy and Menem, who asked her to resign from the commission. Pagano explained that if that was necessary she had her resignation from the position of president at her disposal, but that the
institutional mechanisms had to be articulated to do it correctly.
He explained that she could not do something that was illegal, that is, ignore the constitution of the commission and its appointment,
which had been voted by the majority
. In short, they should look for an elegant solution to the problem. Menem proposed that she join two commissions:
Finance or Freedom of Expression
, which she declined in one because she was not a specialist and in the other due to a conflict of interest, coming from the world of journalism.
The opposition, meanwhile,
remains firm in its position of considering Pagano as the legitimate president of the Impeachment Commission
, since there was a quorum and it was voted for by the majority. According to what opposition deputies explain to
Clarín
, Menem does not have the power to dissolve the conformation, and that accepting what she seeks would create a worrying precedent in Congress. "The next time we vote on something you don't like, you could make the same decision," they point out. In that sense, they add that the commission
can only meet if it is convened by Pagano, not Menem.
Operations, threats and his fight with Lilia Lemoine
One of those targeted by this offensive to obtain Pagano's resignation in the Impeachment Trial is precisely Lilia Lemoine, the cosplayer deputy who last Thursday burst into the commission meeting to warn that the meeting was invalid because seconds before the aforementioned time Martín Menem had sent an email suspending the meeting.
Members of the libertarian space in Deputies point out that Lemoine had threatened Pagano in the hours before his hospitalization through WhatsApp.
“That unbalanced her, they were threats,”
they say. There are versions that cryptic messages ranging
from “gualichos” to “physical violence” were sent.
Added to this is another accusation, but about alleged
espionage
, which was established in the last few hours and has as its protagonist an employee of the office of a Mileista deputy
who would have carried out monitoring tasks for Pagano.
As Clarín
learned
, the journalist confided in those around her about two situations she experienced in recent months that caught her attention. She identified that a person from Lemoine's office was following her when she was waiting for another deputy in a cafe. And she also said that that same advisor appeared to her after her at a restaurant where she was having dinner with someone. Coincidence or not, she aroused his suspicions.
Added to that was another episode that happened two days before the whole scandal broke out over her appointment as president of the Impeachment Commission. It was that the previous Tuesday, her cell phone was stolen while she was walking her dog, as Clarín reported on Sunday. Now, that fact of insecurity that they believed was broadcast about her takes on another aspect as a result of the complaints of espionage, monitoring and pressure, in the midst of her resistance to her resignation as president of the Impeachment Trial.
The feud between Pagano and Lemoine is not new. The Buenos Aires representative was in charge of not only interrupting the meeting in which her Buenos Aires counterpart was appointed as president, but then publicly ranted and stated that she did not trust her for that key position, that she preferred "Bertie" Benegas Lynch.
“I spent every day banking the rags,
I didn't go on vacation to Europe, I stayed with my colleagues, banking the rags, like everyone else. Bah, not one
, curious... she is the only one who claims the Impeachment Commission”, she pointed out to him on the night of the scandal in her radio program “They don't see her”.