Truth’s Empire: Statistics and the Manipulation of Democracy

Illustration by ASAFHANUKA

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This is a story about money and statistics, and it begins with three nuns. In the early morning hours of June 14, 2016, in General Rodríguez, a suburb west of Buenos Aires, a man named Jesús saw someone park outside Our Lady of Fatima and begin throwing bags over the convent’s white concrete wall. June meant it was almost winter in Argentina. The jacarandas over Evita’s grave had long since dropped their purple blossoms. The dogs along the highway had begun to look more gaunt. It was cold, and the windows of the buses rumbling down Avenida San Martín were steamed over with the moist heat of the bodies inside. Jesús, thinking of the three Carmelite nuns who lived behind those white walls, did what any neighbor might do and called the police. Just outside the convent’s door was a closed-circuit television camera, its angle giving it a slightly fish-eyed view of a small exterior vestibule, floored in red tile and well-lit, with an archway leading out into the night. It was shortly after 3 a.m. when a figure stepped through that archway and out of the darkness.

Smallish, with thinning hair and the broad, beaked face of an owl, he wears an athletic leisure sweater and a pair of sneakers, and in his hands he held a number of duffels of various sizes, as well as an oblong object, black and misshapen. These he left by the convent’s door before disappearing back in the direction from which he came. The door then opened a crack, revealing the figure of a crouching nun whose hand snaked out to bring the bags inside. A few moments later, the man returned carrying yet more bags. Along with the nun, he disappeared into the convent, and for roughly an hour and a half they were gone from sight. The camera recorded only that doorway, the night sky, the strange black object lying on the ground.

About half past four, the man emerged again, striding off in the direction of his car, and it was at this moment that the police, having found their way to the scene, encountered him. The confrontation occurred off camera, but he first told them, according to allegations later made in court, that he was a church official. When this failed to allay their curiosity about the timing and circumstances of his visit, he instead offered to pay them $1 million to forget or ignore the encounter, his presence at Our Lady of Fatima. They declined. Three agents enter the frame soon after, and though its contours are still difficult to make out in the muted grainy world of CCTV, in the real world occupied by flesh-and-blood human beings, it was at this moment that the oblong object, still lying neglected outside the convent door, must have become painfully obvious to all present: a black SIG SAUER automatic rifle, complete with scope, light, bipod, and a magazine not quite entirely full.

The duffels, as police shortly discovered, were stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of bills in various currencies—dollars, mostly, but also euros, yuan, pesos, and even, bizarrely, two Qatari riyals. All told (the damp bills took twenty-two hours to count) there was roughly $9 million. This alongside the sort of expensive trinkets—iPhones, fat metal wristwatches— that, with their promise of appointments to be kept, lunch reservations to be made, are de rigueur for a certain set of business-minded individuals. The man with the intense owl-like stare, the business-minded individual in question, was José López, secretary of public works under Argentina’s previous president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

The news of López’s arrest, and the circumstances surrounding it, dominated headlines the next day and for many days after. It was said that he was “un hombre muy bueno pero estaba medio loco” (the nun’s...