Fittingly, perhaps, for the inhabitants of a large country, the Argentines do not do things by half-measures. When its Presidents are corrupt, they tend to be brazenly so. “Descarados” is the apt Spanish term; Britons of a certain age would have called them “bounders.” The most descarado of Argentina’s bounders, in modern times, was probably Carlos Saúl Menem, who ran the country, from 1989 to 1999, with a shamelessness that brings to mind Silvio Berlusconi. When a businessman gave him a brand-new red Ferrari as a present while he was in office, for example, Menem drove it proudly around the city. When he was questioned about it, Menem exclaimed, “It’s mine, mine, mine!”

Such antics are the stuff of great public theatre, if only they didn’t point to an appalling dearth of honesty in the highest elected public offices. Menem, now eighty-five years old, retains a congressional seat that gives him judicial immunity, which is how he has managed to evade prison despite being found guilty of weapons smuggling and embezzlement, and being sentenced to two separate prison terms.

In April of last year, I sat down for an interview with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was then the President of Argentina, shortly after her appearance with the leaders of the Western Hemisphere at Summit of the Americas, in Panama City. The stars of the summit were Barack Obama and Raúl Castro, who were appearing together for the first time since the dramatic restoration of relations between their two countries, in December, 2014. The other leaders in attendance were inevitably reduced to the roles of supporting actors and, in some cases, mere extras.

Such was the case with Kirchner, whose Presidency was beginning to wind down, in the final year of her second term, but who nonetheless flew in for the event. She agreed to meet with me at her hotel, a green-tinted glass tower overlooking the city’s cornice and a yacht marina in Panama Bay.

As I waited in the lobby, I watched a television that was showing the final event of the summit, in which each President speaks on a subject of his or her choice. When it was her turn, Kirchner began speaking about the Latin American plague of narcotráfico. She then spoke about money laundering, and suggested that the world’s wealthy consumer nations bore the greatest responsibility for creating the demand for narcotics, and for owning the banks and tax havens where narco-traffickers launder their ill-gotten gains.

There was an amusing, if unintended, irony in Kirchner’s remarks, because the hotel where she and her entourage were staying was rumored to have been built for the express purpose of laundering money. When her spokesman showed up, I told him, laughingly, about the hotel’s reputation. He looked stricken, and assured me that the President hadn’t chosen it herself; the government of Panama had assigned the hotel. I tried to lighten the mood by saying something to the effect that we were, after all, in Panama, where everything was a money laundry. He looked somewhat relieved and, a few minutes later, led me upstairs to the President’s suite.

When I heard recently that one of her former senior officials had been arrested on corruption charges, I thought back to my awkward banter with her spokesman. The former official in question, José López, who served as the secretary of public works under both Kirchner and her late husband, Néstor, was arrested after he was spotted throwing several large bags over the wall of a rural convent, Our Lady of the Rosary of Fátima, late on the night of June 14th. Called to the scene, police found López in an agitated state. He apparently offered them a bribe, which they refused. Inside the bags they found nearly two hundred pounds of paper bills of various currencies, including yen, euros, and U.S. dollars, totalling some nine million dollars. There were also a number of luxury watches and a semiautomatic assault rifle—all of which, it seems, López was hoping to conceal on the convent’s grounds. The dampness of the bills suggested that the bags had previously been buried and that López was seeking a new hiding place. That, however, is pure speculation, because López has refused to speak.

When she left office, in December, Kirchner had been at the center of public life for more than a decade, since her husband won the Presidency, in 2003. He stepped aside, in 2007, to allow his wife to run, then died, of a heart attack, in 2010. The Kirchners were Peronistas, meaning that they swore allegiance to the enduring political phenomenon inspired by Juan Domingo Perón, the late President whose legacy is so confoundingly multifarious that it has acquired adherents on the left and right, like some kind of multihued national cloak. The Kirchners adopted a leftist course, siding with the late Hugo Chávez and the Castros in world affairs, while lambasting the United States. Kirchner engaged in a long-running feud with the media conglomerate Grupo Clarín, accusing it of having a Mafia-like hold over the flow of information in Argentina. Later, she took on international debt speculators, calling them “vultures” and refusing to pay them, in what became a prolonged and, for Argentina’s credit rating, deleterious standoff.

Cristina Kirchner was accused of amassing a fortune while she and her husband were in office, and then of far worse. In January, 2015, the prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead in his apartment, the night before he was due to deliver evidence that, he claimed, would show that she had conspired with Iran to conceal its involvement in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Kirchner’s first reaction was to suggest that Nisman had committed suicide; she then claimed that her own intelligence agency had murdered him, and called for its dissolution.

When I met Kirchner in Panama, last April, she told me that she was convinced that Nisman’s murder, as well as his denunciations of her, were part of a vast conspiracy “linked to the Middle East,” and having to do with “negotiations between Iran and the United States, with the Five Powers,” and with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “visit to the Congress.” She continued, “I believe we are looking at an international operation that involves the intelligence agencies of the world.” I asked her if she was suggesting that Israel was somehow involved. “No, I point to none of them, and to all of them,” she said. Kirchner told me that she couldn’t say anything further while a judicial inquiry was under way, but she urged me to watch a BBC spy drama she had recently enjoyed, called “The Honorable Woman,” about a British heiress who is the daughter of an Israeli arms dealer, and who gets caught up in the violent entanglements of the new Middle East.

I asked Kirchner what she thought her legacy would be. She said it would be egocentric to engage in this question, adding, “In any case, history will take care of defining the legacy—it always does.”

Since Kirchner left office, federal prosecutors have ramped up an investigation into the activities of a group of businessmen with close ties to her and her late husband. On April 5th, Lázaro Báez, who grew extremely wealthy from government construction contracts during the Kirchners’ years in power, was arrested after a former associate testified against him and the Kirchners. Báez has been charged with participating in a scheme in which hundreds of millions of dollars from government contracts were laundered through a complex web of fictitious offshore companies. Mossack Fonseca, the firm at the center of the recent Panama Papers scandal, is alleged to have played a role in the laundering scheme. Argentina’s new government also accused López—he of the bags-of-cash scandal—of favoring Báez’s construction firm in the allocation of road-building contracts.