Facundo Manes after the opening session of Congress’s ordinary legislative period in March last year.
Argentina’s Federal Court of Appeals in Buenos Aires has upheld the dismissal of the criminal case against presidential adviser Santiago Caputo, rejecting an appeal filed by former congressman Facundo Manes over alleged threats made during a tense legislative session in March 2025. The ruling leaves in place the first-instance decision that cleared Caputo of criminal liability, with judges Martín Irurzun and Eduardo Farah in the majority and judge Roberto Boico dissenting.
The case grew out of an exchange that began during President Javier Milei’s speech opening the ordinary session of Congress and continued afterward in the corridors of the lower house. Although much of what happened took place outside the official broadcast, recordings made by journalists, officials, and others present were later used to reconstruct the episode behind the complaint.
Manes had challenged the earlier decision issued by judge María Eugenia Capuchetti, who closed the case. At an earlier stage, the appeals court ordered a review and requested clarification on whether Manes could take part as a private complainant. After that review, however, the court ultimately confirmed the dismissal.
The chamber found that the statements attributed to Caputo did not reach the legal threshold required under Argentine criminal law to qualify as punishable threats. According to the ruling, the case file did not contain enough objective elements to treat the disputed remarks as a criminal offense.
Why the Court Found No Criminal Threat
In explaining the ruling, the majority held that Manes’s personal sense of intimidation, even if genuine, was not enough on its own to establish the crime of threats. One of the judges stressed that under existing case law and legal doctrine, criminal liability requires an identifiable warning of concrete, serious, and imminent harm.
Judge Eduardo Farah acknowledged the complainant’s account and the possible impact of the expressions reportedly used during the confrontation, including phrases Manes interpreted as intimidating. But Farah concluded that, viewed objectively, the words described in the case file did not reach the level of seriousness and immediacy required by law.
He also noted that the dispute did not take place during a formal speech or legislative intervention, but after the session had already ended. For that reason, the court drew a distinction between broader debates over freedom of expression and the narrower criminal-law question of whether a punishable offense had actually occurred.The majority further stressed that criminal liability cannot rest on subjective fear alone. In its view, the circumstances described in the complaint, even in a setting marked by political tension and personal unease, were not enough to justify continuing a criminal case.
Santiago Caputo at Congress in March 2025.
A Split Decision in a Highly Charged Political Context
The ruling was not unanimous. Judge Roberto Boico voted to overturn the dismissal, arguing that the investigation was still incomplete and that additional evidentiary steps were needed before the case could be closed. In particular, he pointed to pending witness testimony and other procedural measures that, in his view, should have been exhausted first.
Boico also argued that the court should have examined more fully the issues raised by Manes as complainant, including the scope and possible consequences of the alleged conduct. In his view, it was premature to rule out criminal relevance without first completing those lines of inquiry under Argentina’s National Criminal Procedure Code.
The majority, however, backed the first-instance judge and gave particular weight to the institutional setting in which the confrontation took place. Judges Irurzun and Farah described the exchange as part of a heated political dispute inside Congress, an environment in which confrontational language is not unusual and does not automatically amount to criminal conduct.
Irurzun wrote that the evidence gathered in the case, including the measures requested by the complainant, was enough to reconstruct how the episode unfolded, even if not every requested step had been granted. That conclusion aligned with the prosecution’s position and with the lower court’s view that the facts did not amount to a crime.
By confirming the dismissal, the appeals court endorsed a narrow reading of the crime of threats in politically charged settings. In the majority’s view, remarks made during or immediately after a confrontation in Congress do not become criminal threats unless they clearly convey concrete, grave, and imminent harm. With that reasoning, the court closed the case against Caputo and left standing the current judicial standard for assessing criminal responsibility in moments of high legislative tension.
