translated from Spanish: moments from Robles’ audience

Dressed in trousers and a beige blouse, Rosario Robles presented herself on December 12 to her hearing of appeal between long yawns through the slaun – it was eight o’clock and she was woken up hours before for her transfer from the Santa Martha Acatitla prison – rubbing her palms on a frosty morning in Mexico City. 
Accompanied by her daughter Mariana Moguel, and other members of a wealthy family who filled the hearing room of the Reclusorio Norte, Rosario took a seat surrounded by her lawyers, and after settling a lock of black hair that fell on her cheek, began to hear with serious countenance the argument of Epigmenio Mendieta, one of her defenders.
Read more ‘I don’t want privileges’: Tuesday will know if Robles is held or revoked in pre-trial detention
“Judge Felipe de Jesús Delgadillo Padierna violated due process and unjustifiably decreed pre-trial detention against Rosario Robles,” the defender said, referring to the decision that the judge of the case made last August, when he remanded the former holder of Social Development and Sedatu, arguing that there was a risk of escape due to the prosecution The Master Scam.
For about an hour and a half that lasted the hearing, Cristina Porras Odriozola, the magistrate who will have to decide in the next three business days whether to maintain, revoke, or modify the pre-trial detention, listened to the defense and the prosecutor’s office in the middle of a silence that only interrupted with constant wake-up calls so that lawyers and prosecutors would not get hooked on mutual disqualifications.
Situation that was impossible, since, although this Thursday’s appeal hearing was not to present evidence for or against Rosario Robles, it became at times a final trial where both sides sought to convince a magistrate who repeated them time and time again that there would not be decided on the innocence or guilt of the accused.
But the warnings had no great effect and the milestones were constant. 
The defense launched the first attack: it accused the Public Prosecutor’s Office of using a fake driver’s license of Rosario Robles to argue before Judge Delgadillo Padierna that she had lied about her address, because the ex-worker said she lived in Coyoacán, and the alleged license states that her address is on Tennyson Street of the Alvaro Obregón delegation, which does not exist; why they reported to the Public Prosecution Service for allegedly using false documentation.
“It’s a ‘Fake-license,'” Rosario Robles said, addressing the magistrate.
“Your Honor, you see that there are now ‘Fake news’,” he explained in an informal tone. Well, this is a ‘Fake-license’.
Read more: Rosario Robles asks Deputies to dismiss impeachment against her for being ‘inappropriate’
The journey through Paris
For his part, the public prosecutor’s office counterattacked using the defense’s argument that there is no risk of escape because Rosario Robles “has no money”, because his accounts are blocked by the authority. 
“Does Rosario Robles have no money?” the prosecutor writhed ironically. “Does he really only have 20 thousand pesos?” he asked again, referring to one of the defense’s sayings, that one of Robles’ blocked accounts had that amount. 
“And then how could he make a trip through Europe, through France and Italy? -The prosecutor questioned, to add that Robles, before receiving the summons to appear before he was brought to justice, planned a two-month trip with his daughter Mariana Moguel to visit, among other places, Paris, France.
“Who can afford such a trip with that kind of money?” insisted the agent, who also asked Robles how he can then pay his large team of lawyers: “Here at this hearing, you have up to four law firms present!”
In addition, the prosecutor used without naming it the case of former Veracruz governor Javier Duarte to attack Rosario Robles. 
“Today you can say they come to face, but that is not enough, Your Honor. We know that there are helicopters that can bring a person quickly to Guatemala,” the agent hinted, in clear reference to Duarte, who one day said in an interview in a media outlet that he would face the court for allegations of diversion of public resources in the case of Las Empresas Fantasma de Veracruz, documented by Political Animal, and at the hour he was already in unfamiliar whereabouts and on the run, until he was arrested months later in Guatemala. 
“What happened was that she (Rosario Robles) came here with the confidence that nothing was going to happen to her, perhaps because of the statements of her former boss (former president Peña Nieto), when she said, ‘Don’t worry, Rosario,’ the prosecutor insisted in his statement, in which he also accused Robles of having a “support network” of officials and former officials “who could hide it.” 
“We’re talking about 5 billion pesos. It is enough money for someone to help her hide,” the Public Prosecutor’s Office stressed, referring to the original accusation against Robles, which is the alleged crime of misconduct by the civil service that resulted in alleged damage to the treasury of more than 5 billion pesos in the case of The Master Scam.
Find out: Rosario Robles defends her innocence before the judge and asks to follow her process in freedom
“Am I a trophy?”
Despite the magistrate’s efforts to cut off the exchange of accusations, the thermometer in the courtroom had already risen several degrees. Although, Rosario was still cold. 
“Your Honor, may I stand up and put on my jacket? I’m freezing,” she asked. 
Rosario stood up and left in sight a thin silhouette, which covered with a very different coat to the elegant trench coat and the white dress that she looked new from Europe to face her first audience, when, make-up and with heels, she came down from a van and presented herself to the media ensuring that she stood with her face aloft and grabbing the bull by the horns. 
He then listened to the magistrate informing her that the audience would close with her closing argument, and took a seat again to begin reading a speech she was carrying in a notebook from which she took four sheets adorned with youthful drawings of lipstick and heart, and phrases like ‘U never takes a day off’ –You never take a day off-. 
For 10 minutes, Rosario read the letter she had written in prison in clear letter, underlined, and some other stud, and delivered a speech full of emphatically pauses and gesticulation with her hands. 
At times, Rosario showed her mastery of oratory as a veteran civil servant trying to win the complicity of the magistrate, who asked if she was also a mother like her to attack one of Judge Delgadillo Padierna’s arguments about the possible risk of flight.
“How can the judge say I have no roots (in Mexico City)? I have a house I’ve lived in for the last 25 years. And, in a special way, you, as a woman and as a mother, i know that you will understand me very well when I say that there is no greater root in a place than our children. They are our main root,” Robles told the magistrate, who watched her in silence. 
Finally, after lamenting the paradox he is accused of omissions in irregularities that third officials would have committed in the case of The Master Scam, she is the only process-linked party facing her case in prison, while several of those third parties who have already been linked remain in the case at large. 
“Am I a trophy to exhibit an alleged fight to corruption?” asked Rosario Robles emphatically, while, in the room next to the audience, reporters were trying to transcribe the phrase that minutes later opened the headlines of much of Mexico’s newspapers. 
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Original source in Spanish