MADRID, Spain – The former secretary general of the PSOE in Argentina, Lorena Suárez, was accused by her right-hand man of encouraging the falsification of dead people’s passports in Spain’s 2023 general elections through postal voting abroad. An audio obtained by OKDIARIO shows the socialist politician, in a telephone conversation with a party member, asking him to join a circuit of colleagues to go and collect votes, with the aim of increasing Argentine support for Pedro Sánchez.
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The plan to commit the alleged fraud, according to the leader of the PSOE in Argentina herself, Lorena Suárez, speaking to an unidentified party member, was to obtain a photocopy of the Spanish passport. Until the 18th it can be sent by mail, the socialist warned. Suárez was trying to take advantage of the recent abolition of the requested vote by Félix Bolaños, thanks to which applicants for postal voting abroad were no longer obliged to provide an official document certifying their identity. If you get your dad’s or anyone else’s, the passport, the photo, I can sort it out with that, explained the secretary general of the PSOE in Argentina, who at that time reported to Pilar Cancela, then responsible for the party abroad and now Secretary of State for Migrations.
In recruiting votes, she also suggested to the interlocutor that he take the passport of your aunt, the one who died. Indeed, the socialist played a very active role in defending the Democratic Memory and Grandchildren’s Law, mobilising the new Spanish electorate in Argentina since it came into force. Suárez attended the PSOE Federal Committee in Madrid, where the lists for the 2023 elections were ratified and where she posed in several photographs alongside Pedro Sánchez.
The scandalous conversation was recorded and made available to PSOE members in Argentina. A year later, members of the Argentine PSOE brought it to the attention of the Council of Spanish Residents in Buenos Aires with the aim of reporting, before this official body attached to the consulate, the practices the leader had carried out, with the members distancing themselves from the alleged postal electoral fraud. In the email obtained by OKDIARIO, sent by the former organisation secretary of the PSOE in Argentina, Gustavo López Pardo, the leaked conversation of Suárez with an unidentified interlocutor was transcribed literally, including her request for the passport photocopy, her warning that it could be sent by mail until the 18th, her suggestion to take the passport of a deceased aunt, and her offer to include the interlocutor in a circuit of colleagues going to collect votes.
The email added that they wished to express their rejection and repudiation of Suárez’s expressions and practices, at odds with the most elementary democratic conduct, stating that these had never formed part of the political history of the PSOE Argentina. In the eyes of the PSOE members, the alleged vote fraud was, if possible, more serious given that the person encouraging it was the highest official of the party in Argentina, because of the responsibility this entails and in a context of the recent repeal of the requested vote, for which Spanish citizens living outside Spain had fought. Indeed, according to the email, it was the scandal over the intention to commit electoral fraud in the overseas vote in Argentina that led Suárez to resign from the party’s executive in August 2024, with the Argentine PSOE having since been run by a management committee controlled directly from Ferraz.
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The resignation was submitted by Suárez citing a lack of confidence, yet neither Ferraz nor the Argentine executive dispensed with her or opened disciplinary proceedings against her. A different fate befell Gustavo López, a heavyweight of the PSOE in Buenos Aires historically linked to Electoral Action and who knew Suárez perfectly well, given that he was part of the executive. After the email López sent to the Council of Spanish Residents, the leadership of the Spanish and Argentine PSOE decided to dispense with him.
