On September 1, 2022, a man pulled the trigger of a gun inches from former Argentine president Cristina Kirchner’s head. The bullet missed, and Kirchner was unharmed, unaware at the time that she had just been the victim of a failed assassination attempt. But the attack was recorded, and the video quickly went viral, playing endlessly on cell phones and televisions across a nation in shock. Three years later, the Sixth Federal Court of Buenos Aires sentenced the attacker, Fernando Sabag Montiel, to 10 years in prison for attempting to assassinate Kirchner. His ex-girlfriend, Brenda Uliarte, received an eight-year sentence for being a “necessary accomplice.”
The court found both defendants guilty and consolidated Sabag Montiel’s sentences. He will serve a total of 14 years in prison, taking into account his previous four-year sentence for selling child pornography.
The assassination attempt took place in front of dozens of supporters of the former president, who gathered daily in front of her home in Recoleta, an affluent neighborhood in Buenos Aires. They did so to show solidarity with her in the final stretch of a corruption trial for which she was ultimately convicted. Sabag Montiel, armed with a Bersa pistol, camouflaged himself among those asking for selfies and for Kirchner to sign copies of her book Sincerely, until he was right in front of the former president and fired at her. However, the shot failed to go off.
The crowd detained Sabag Montiel and handed him over to the police. Television stations that recorded the failed attack live also later showed Brenda Uliarte leaving the scene.
The perpetrator of the attack confessed in court that his intention was to kill the former president. “Because she’s corrupt, she steals, and she harms society,” he explained in June. His rhetoric remained the same from the outset. “I wanted to kill her,” he said in his pre-trial statement. Among the reasons he listed at the time was feeling “humiliated for going from being a well-off person to being a street vendor selling cotton buds.”
This job as a street vendor, which he shared with Uliarte under the orders of Nicolás Carrizo, another suspect who was subsequently released, led to the defendants becoming known as “the cotton bud gang.”
The chats found on their phones revealed that it wasn’t an improvised attack, but rather one planned a couple of months in advance. “I’m going to go to Cristina’s house and shoot her. If it’s not me, it’ll be another sicko,” Sabag Montiel told his girlfriend in a WhatsApp message. She wasn’t far behind. “I’m going to have Cristina killed. I sent a guy to kill Cristina, I didn’t pay him, he’s also pissed at her,” she wrote to a friend, referring to Sabag Montiel.
The trial began in June 2024, and 157 witnesses testified before the court composed of Judges Sabrina Namer, Adrián Grünberg, and Ignacio Fornari. They unanimously decided to acquit Carrizo after both the Prosecutor’s Office and the plaintiffs had dropped the charges against him. In his final remarks, hours before the verdict, Carrizo lamented having spent three years in pretrial detention. “No one is going to give them back to me.”
On Wednesday, in his final remarks, Sabag Montiel stated that “the entire case was fabricated” and confusingly compared it to the murder of prosecutor Alberto Nisman. Uliarte declined to exercise her right to speak.
Kirchner’s lawyers unsuccessfully attempted to have the trial also move forward in identifying the alleged masterminds behind the failed assassination attempt. “What has been left out has to do with various pieces of evidence that have emerged over the course of these nearly two years that could link people in the political sphere. On the first day of the investigation, the main defendant’s phone was erased under unknown circumstances. Today we have three people who were visibly involved, but not in the general context,” said plaintiff’s attorney Marcos Aldazabal at the start of the trial.
In August of last year, when Kirchner testified before the court as a victim, she complained that the investigation had focused on the perpetrators of the attack and had not included “the masterminds and financiers.” The former president maintains that they did not act on their own initiative but that there was a “political plot” operating behind them, for which the court has so far found no evidence.
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