BUENOS AIRES: Former Argentine president Cristina Kirchner arrived in court Tuesday for the start of a corruption trial that will unfold as the country heads towards general elections in October. Kirchner, 66, is accused of favoring a businessman friend, Lazaro Baez, for lucrative road construction contracts in Argentina´s southern Santa Cruz province. The charges date from her two terms as Argentina´s president from 2007-2015. In a message on Twitter hours before her court appearance, she dismissed the trial as a “smokescreen” intended to distract voters from the country´s “dramatic” economic problems. “It is a new act of persecution with a single objective: to place a former president opposed to this government on the defendants´ bench during a full presidential campaign,” she wrote.