Corruption ends democracy, gradually invading those spaces of power where darkness favors partisanship to spread its wings with impunity. Politics, understood as the exercise of blind, mute, and deaf loyalty to a party, spreads like an oil slick wherever control mechanisms are conspicuous by their absence.
When the stench of the sewers invades everything that has been allowed to be stained, out of fear, love, submission, or neglect, it doesn't matter; we citizens feel defenseless, detached from our institutions, legitimized for distance and self-defense. When the degradation is so evident that politics is perceived as the main problem for coexistence, the failed state is clearly outlined.
Citizens are not a uniform entity incapable of understanding and relating. Natural intelligence coexists in the street with those who know and understand what is happening and with those capable of relating the information apprehended. Both perceive the bad smell from miles away and reach the same or similar conclusions, even though we are endowed with different capacities and do not have the same knowledge. The affiliate is not the average citizen.
Therefore, we have already turned our faces away from the government of the judiciary. It is the true judiciary that we citizens look at head-on, the thousands of judges, prosecutors, and legal operators who get up every day to represent an independent power of the State with all the difficulties that this entails. We citizens are judged daily by thousands of people who put on the robe to administer justice under the criteria of independence, objectivity, immobility, and professionalism.
Corruption cases are the mirror where many citizens see the health of the judiciary reflected. When judges and prosecutors feel the need to "affiliate" or "belong" to an association to feel protected, when the top of the justice system acts with the same sense of impunity as the corrupt, it is because the law has yielded to arbitrariness. When an abstention is considered an option for someone who knows they are directly and indirectly involved in the criminal case, it is because the stain has been allowed to spread with impunity.
Do you remember when the corrupt justify their illicit acts with expressions like "everyone does it the same way"? The last Fiscal Council is another chapter of those actions with which the prestige of the institutions is frivolously played with. The last Fiscal Council reveals the lack of the slightest democratic sense of those called to represent the public interest and legality. The way in which the expulsion of Mr. Ignacio Stampa from the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office has been orchestrated is the confirmation that professionalism and independence are considered high risk for the establishment and opportunely penalized.
This chapter will cease to be news, it will pass like so many others, but the message of fear remains and the bad smell will not go away. Make no mistake, it will be added indissolubly to that of many others that will come and to that of many others that are already in our memory and form the conviction, increasingly widespread, that the judiciary is the General Council of the Judiciary and that the General Council of the Judiciary is politics and that politics is subject to the top of the economic power and, therefore, politics is our main problem.
It is not only politics that must stay away from the judiciary, it is the judiciary that must stay away from politics. Not because judges and prosecutors, the true judiciary, cannot have ideology, religion, or beliefs. It is that the judiciary cannot be governed by the most faithful ideologues, by the most submissive believers, or by the best practitioners of political genuflection.
This is the photograph of a failed state. Hiding and giving up is burying oneself in the sewers, it is getting used to smelling bad. The silence of fear is deafening.