Javier Milei believes he’s a prophet. He’s 53 years old, and when he won the primary elections that would later make him the president of Argentina. He thanked his four-legged children: Conan, Murray, Milton, Robert and Lucas, ‘the most important thing in my life’. His four-legged children, as he calls them, are his dogs and Conan is dead. Those dogs are clones of his beloved Conan.
After the death of Conan, his most faithful friend, the ones who know him say he changed completely. He dealt with that death with a parapsychologist and telepath who read the dog’s mind and let Milei communicate with him. His sister Karina who he says is “the boss” and considers ‘the first lady’ studied to become a medium after Conan died and began to be the one who communicated with Conan with Milei, an activity that to this day is crucial in the life of Karina, who claims to be able to speak with both living and dead animals and makes important decisions based on that.
Thanks to conversing with his deceased pet, Milei discovered that Conan wasn’t dead, it had just physically disappeared and had gone to sit next to the ‘number one’ to protect him. Thanks to that he had started to have conversations with God himself. God, through Conan, gave Milei a mission: to become president.
Milei won the runoff election, promising to chainsaw the State. He spent the entire electoral campaign carrying a chainsaw during his speeches, promising that he would cut public health and education, privatize national companies like Aerolíneas Argentinas and Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF) which is an energy company that explores, exploits, produces and distributes electricity, gas, oil and hydrocarbon derivatives.
One of his campaign promises was that he would wait for people to gain higher purchasing power before removing subsidies and that did not happen. So, removing all subsidies and regulations on prices has only made people poorer in two months of government, forcing them to choose between having a meal on their table or paying for a bus ticket. Milei argues that to eliminate inflation, the country must first endure suffering, hence why he’s impoverishing the people.
His discourse incites violence, he shouts, and he argues with people on Twitter all the time. He speaks particularly poorly to women, in a country that passed the abortion law four years ago thanks to the feminist movement. His party wants to repeal it, returning to old practices where thousands of women could die.
Since he took office, he lived in a five-star hotel for a month while the room for his four-legged children in the presidential residence was being set up. Many imagined that those dogs, who had lived in an apartment almost all their lives, would finally be able to run in the large park at the estate. Some time ago, he tweeted a picture of where they would live: in kennels, cages. But this isn’t the first time he’s used cages for his dogs. Milei used to keep them in his 100-square-meter apartment.
Since they couldn’t fit there, because they weighed 100 kilos and stood almost two meters tall when standing, he had to knock walls down and designed a strange system where he had them tied to the floor using pulleys. Something quite symbolic came from someone who promised freedom under his slogan ‘viva la libertad’ which is suffocating the people.
He won the elections, saying he hated politicians. He even said he used to punch a doll of Raul Alfonsin, who was the president during the return to democracy after the military dictatorship that left 30.000 people disappeared between 1976 and 1983.
Hating politicians and hating the state as the guarantor of rights only serves to distance Argentina from the freedom that Milei claims to defend.
Edited by Avanie Hiranadani
Picture credits: Tomas Cuesta - Getty Images