Argentina overwhelmingly elected a market-radical eccentric who you wouldn’t want meet in the moonlight for their president
by Hermann Ploppa
He exudes the charisma of a vacuum cleaner salesman who uses cocaine and alcohol to get the most out of himself. The presidential candidate is waving around wildly with a chainsaw. The man wants to use this to saw apart the political caste on the Rio de la Plata. Fake dollar bills with the face of this very presidential candidate, Javier Milei, rain down on his cheering fans. Milei wants to abolish the Argentine national currency and introduce the US dollar instead and at the same time “blow up” the Argentine central bank. Milei performs a wild dervish dance on stage when it is clear that he has won the election by a landslide, ten percent ahead of his rival from the Peronist party. “The Wig” (La Peluca), as Milei is called by his fans because of his wild rocker hair, never minces his words and uses sub-proletarian jargon to rant against anyone whom he doesn’t like. The Argentinian Pope Francis is also disqualified as an “emissary of evil” by Milei. The “wig” enjoys an almost inexplicable immunity and jester’s licence in the country. The last presidential election in Argentina was at least not boring at any stage because of this Latin American version of a buffoon. In Argentina, too, you score points by attacking the ruling caste of politicians with hateful tirades. But while we in the northern hemisphere are still complaining at a very high level, the Argentinians have had nothing to laugh about or bite about for a long time. The annual inflation rate is an incredible 145 percent. Unemployment is officially only seven percent. But there is hidden unemployment, and it can be as high as 44 percent. <1>
There are big regional differences. While the greater area around the capital Buenos Aires is still relatively well positioned, people in structurally weak regions can definitely go hungry. The proportion of Argentines living below the poverty line is currently estimated to be over forty percent <2>. Argentina was an extremely wealthy country until the mid-1950s. Back then, people immigrated en masse from crisis-ridden Europe to finally find orderly conditions in Argentina. The political coordinates in Argentina are different from the rest of the world. The politician Juan Peron, who sympathized with fascism, dominated the scene for a long time. His authoritarian style of government went hand in hand with an active social policy. The price-performance ratio was right for the common people. But the military repeatedly seized power and left scorched earth behind. The so-called Peronism developed many different varieties. Social Democratic Peronists dominated the scene, repeatedly interrupted by military coups. In the long term, this contributed to the disastrous alliance of oligarchs, latifundistas, reactionary Catholic clergy and Peronist politicians who mismanaged to a power stalemate. The ever-increasing unemployment was disguised by creating always new jobs in the public service. In this way, 22 percent of all employees are active in the public sector <3>. An eternal back and forth between half-baked approaches to social justice and market-radical clear-cutting policies has ruined the country.
In this situation, large sections of Argentine society are clearly willing to vote for anyone who looks different from the established politicians. It is not good news that Javier Milei has to announce. The state apparatus should be dismantled with a chainsaw, so to speak. Whatever is not nailed down should be privatized. The state should only be there to protect property and create legal certainty. Everything else should be handled by the private sector. Private prisons. To make this worthwhile, the minimum age for imprisonment should be lowered. Gun laws should be relaxed. Instead of human rights, there should only be the right to own one’s own body. That’s why anyone can sell their body organs on the open market as they wish. Since children are the products of parental efforts, the children can also be sold. Compulsory schooling is abolished. It is up to the parents how they raise and educate their children <4>. Argentina’s membership in the loose BRICS confederation, which has just been established, will be terminated on January 1st next year. Trade with China shall be reduced to zero. This is of course particularly risky because the People’s Republic of China is currently the country’s second strongest trading partner on Rio de la Plata after Brazil. Instead there will be strong support for Israel and Ukraine once Milei is inaugurated as president.
As a result, Milei immediately flew to Washington before his inauguration on December 10th to meet with representatives of the US government. And on site, Milei went to New York just to visit the grave of Rabbi Menachim M. Schneerson, who had once emigrated from Ukraine to the USA. At this occasion Milei was wearing the obligatory Kipa. He also declared that he would soon convert from Catholicism to Judaism <5>. That’s quite a paradox for a man who prefers to surround himself with his four cloned mastiffs and thus mess with God’s plan of creation. However, these are contradictions that the Catholic Church has come to terms with comfortably. Milei owes his clear victory, among other things, to the fact that he was able to win Victoria Villaruel, a representative of the old clerical-fascist clique, as vice president. Villaruel is the daughter of a general in the military junta that held Argentina firmly under its military boots from 1976 to 1983. An estimated 30,000 people were killed in that infamous era. Villaruel says, just like Milei: no, there were “only” 9,000 people who were brutally murdered. And that was actually only right and fair in the fight against dangerous left-wing “terrorists”. The woman with the Castilian-acid-sour face is also a member of the right-wing radical Pius Brotherhood, for which the Pope is essentially a “communist”.
Furthermore Milei took advantage by the fact that presidential candidate Patricia Bullrich, who was eliminated in the first round, recommended Milei for the runoff election. So who or what does Milei actually want to dismantle with his chainsaw? He was catapulted into office with the help of the same power coalition that has been driving the country into agony for decades. In Argentina, as everywhere in the Western community of values, the old set of politicians is now worn out. Everywhere the compromised liberal conservative and social democratic politicians are being replaced by snotty loudmouths who promise people everything they want to hear. But installed into government, these “populists” differ not that much from their mainstream predecessors. Except that the state is ruined much more quickly and consistently than before.
So the question arises: who pushed this freaky eccentric Javier Milei into the saddle?
And what do the generous patrons hope to gain from it? Milei grew up in humble circumstances and no longer maintains relationships with his parents. He played football in school. His comrades just called him “El Loco,” the lunatic. This nickname would become permanent for obvious reasons, and the first biography about Milei is entitled “El Loco” <6>. In addition, Milei is considered to be choleric and quick-tempered. He studied economics and even completed it. And then he started his career as an economist pretty quickly. He was working at the scandal-ridden HSBC bank for a while. It is rarely mentioned in the media that Milei was also an advisor to the Argentine government at the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes. Unfortunately, this scandalous international institution is completely unknown. It was founded in 1965. It now includes 156 countries around the world. This department of the World Bank provides an arbitration tribunal that becomes active whenever a global corporation feels that its investment activities are being disrupted by the democratically legitimate decisions of national governments. The jury works completely behind closed doors. The deciding jury chairman is almost always a corporate lawyer. And so it is not surprising that this jury almost always decides in favor of the global corporations. Many environmental protection measures have been defeated in this way. The threatened fines for violations by nation states are in the dystopian range of billions. What our friend Milei did at this arbitration board is not known. Milei then advised the coup leader General Antonio Domingo Bussi, who served twice as governor of the Argentine province of Tucumán. Some teaching positions at universities still need to be mentioned. As an adjunct professor at the University of Belgrano, he set the bar for his students so high that no one passed the exam. Because Milei not only offended the students in his choleric manner, but even insulted them, he was removed from his teaching position.
But from 2008 onwards, Javier Milei’s working life reached more quiet waters. Until 2021, he worked steadily in his fatherly mentor Eduardo Eurnekian’s company Corporación America. Eurnekian’s father immigrated to Argentina from Armenia in the 1930s and became rich with a textile company. The textile company had to close in 1981. Eduardo Eurnekian rose to wealth again with a media company. He sold his media conglomerate at a huge profit and now operates 53 airports around the world under franchise. But major transport projects have also at least been considered. Eurnekian commissioned his protégé Milei to plan a new publicly-privately financed road from Argentina with a tunnel through the Andes to Chile. This is how Milei made his first and so far only appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2014. Because Eurnekian sponsors the WEF and is therefore listed as a member <7>. And so he sent Milei to a fairly unimportant panel discussion at the WEF concerning the use of “human capital” in Latin America. Milei is also mentioned on the WEF website <8>. This marginal speech by Milei, which he could not even deliver in English, is all he has to do with the WEF <9>.
There are other forces that will catapult Milei to the top. But first Milei has to become well known in the media. Milei’s patron Eurnekian uses his influence to box his protégé into relevant talk shows and radio programs. Eurnekian also pays a trainer to get Milei fit for media formats <10>. And so Milei chats about God and the world on talk shows and quickly gains popularity because he freely criticizes everything that comes his way. With the popular sports reporter Alejandro Fantino, he goes on a rampage against liberals and “communists” <11>. On his own radio show, he regularly demolishes doctrines that he considers to be myths. Milei was already known throughout Argentina long before he entered politics in 2020 <12>.
Then Milei decides to become a politician.
Namely, as a prophet of a new, even more radical direction of market radicalism that had never been seen before: anarcho-capitalism. The fascist junta, which wreaked havoc from 1976 to 1983, was already market radical oriented. In addition to Chile and Uruguay, Argentina was the third “experimental laboratory” that market radicals maintained with the help of the US secret service CIA in order to test in open-air experiments whether the principles developed by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago were actually valid. However, this type of market radicalism still requires a very proactive state that is supposed to order things in the interests of global corporations. Anarcho-capitalism is a relatively young dialect of market radicalism. According to its inventor, Murray Rothbard, the state is merely a criminal organization that illegally steals property from citizens under legalistic pretexts. The politicians and the state institutions are therefore always parasites. That is why the destruction of the state is morally imperative. In 1973, Rothbard published a so-called Libertarian Manifesto outlining the principles of anarcho-capitalism <13>. Every person has the right to property over themselves. He can decide for himself whether he takes drugs, no matter which drugs; whether he carries weapons wherever and whenever; He can drive 250 kilometers per hour on the road if he considers himself fit for that adventure. The state is not entitled to any restrictions on such arbitrary powers. Of course, Rothbard didn’t come up with such bold ideas entirely on his own. Rather, there was a strong community behind Rothbard from the beginning, according to whose needs he tailored his home-grown ideology. First, Rothbard founded the ultra-conservative Cato Institute with money from Texas oil tycoon Charles Koch in order to wrap the ideology of market radicalism into a scientific guise and to calmly hatch political strategies for seizing power <14>. But in the early 1980s, Rothbard fell out with Charles Koch and founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama. Rothbard. However, he did not live to see his seeds sprout. He died in 1995.
The dismantling of states takes place in several phases. First of all, market radicals infiltrated into governments just to ruin public finances. The inability to act due to insolvency that is now coming to light, as is becoming all too visible with the so-called government shutdown in the USA, is the first successful milestone of the market radicals. Politicians and state officials who have become unable to act are now providing radical market evidence that the state is no good and its actors are all just crooks. The people’s anger is directed towards the state itself. In fact, the state, no matter how inadequate it may be, is still the last large organism that could check the global corporations‘ totalitarian claim for absolute and unrestricted power. This is the hour of the anarcho-capitalists. Now it’s time to demolish the last remnants of the wall against the neo-feudal subjugation of humanity to the digital-military complex. In order to give the state a coup de grace, the Atlas network was founded in 1981 by the British entrepreneur Antony Fisher. Fisher had become rich through the large-scale use of industrial laying hen factories in Europe. He then wanted to use his money to promote “entrepreneurial freedom”. The Atlas Network provides advice and start-up money for radical market, anarcho-capitalist think tanks in nearly all countries around the world. Atlas helps start-ups get on their own feet with acquired donations and government grants. Atlas has already launched several hundred spin-offs in this cost-effective way. There are ten Atlas network organizations in Argentina alone. The central coordinator of these radical market organizations is the Argentine economist Alberto Benegas Lynch. Lynch is also an important figure in the Mont Pelerin Society, from which all radical market activities emanated <15>. And that brings us finally back to our protagonist, Javier Milei. Milei openly refers to Alberto Lynch <16>. Lynch is Milei’s guru, nothing less than that. Milei is a constant guest at the Atlas spin-offs Fundacion Federalismo y Libertad, at Instituto Libertad y Progreso and the Fundacion Atlas <17>. This network has chosen Javier Milei as its executor of its radical market agenda. That’s why the Fundacion Atlas decorated Javier Milei with its Liberty Prize back in 2018. Lynch planned Milei’s career and gave him the anarcho-capitalist program along the way. Ultimately, all paths of the Atlas network lead directly to Washington, the US government. The link between Atlas Latin America and the US government is called: Center for Dissemination of Economic Knowledge for Liberty (CEDICE for short). This center receives funding and strategic instruction from Washington through the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. government. Agency for International Development <18>.
However, things turned out differently than Milei’s former sponsor, Eduardo Eurnekian, had hoped. The now ninety-year-old airport entrepreneur was recently sitting in the front row when the elected Argentine President Milei shouted at the entrepreneurs present: “The state is breathing down your neck! I will get him off your neck!” And although Nicolas Posse, a former top manager of Eurnekian’s empire, serves as the government’s chief of staff, the old oligarch is not really happy about his political offspring. Eurnekian told the Financial Times that he did not believe in the Dollarization of Argentina at all and that he considered the abrupt termination of trade relations with China to be unfeasible and disastrous. He also disapproves of Milei’s insult of the Peronist politicians as „criminals“ and also his insult of the Pope as an „imbecile“ <19>.
This shows the changing function of political puppets in Latin America and elsewhere in the southern hemisphere. Oligarchs in façade democracies have always chosen talented people who they then hyped up with a lot of money and influential connections to state leaders. But this time the national oligarch has been booted out by a powerful international network.
We will see whether Javier Milei really succeeds in destroying the Argentine state and its power cartel, and whether he really intends to do so. In any case, he does not have any political power. His party La Libertad Avanza only has a few seats in parliament. Political forces will stand in Milei’s way if he really wants to use a chainsaw to put hundreds of thousands of public servants out of work. If he really breaks with China and possibly Brazil as trading partners, it will likely cause even more difficulties for the Argentine economy.
But one should not underestimate such bizarre extreme creatures like Milei. At the beginning of his chancellorship, Otto von Bismarck was also considered a crazy idiot. Likewise Adolf Hitler and Maggie Thatcher. At the beginning, no one believed that these extremists would get very far with their agenda. But they got through. Because their opponents did not recognize that a radical new agenda was being launched and implemented. Nobody expected the brutality with which all three extremists were able to enforce their new order. Maybe things will be different this time. Simply because the public is informed about the agenda in good time.
Sources and Notes
<1> https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/verarmt-enttaeuscht-empoert-100.html
<3> https://papers.gws-os.com/L%C3%A4nderreport-29_AR.pdf Seite 2
<6> https://www.eldiarioar.com/economia/eurnekian-ayudo-milei-entrar-politica-medios_1_10370106.html
<7> https://www.weforum.org/people/eduardo-eurnekian/
<8> https://www.weforum.org/people/javier-gerardo-milei/
<9> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IHa8OzqiTw&t=31s
<10> Das wird ausführlich beschrieben im Text Fußnote <6>
<11> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UOHGuaqzYs
<12> https://www.youtube.com/@JavierMileiOK
<13> https://mises.org/library/new-liberty-libertarian-manifesto
<15> https://www.desmog.com/2023/08/22/javier-milei-argentina-atlas-network/
<17> https://www.libertadyprogreso.org/?s=milei&lang=es
<19> https://www.ft.com/content/2cc06399-8214-4a49-a195-4b5be3d32752
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