October 22, 2023 was a black day for the PRO. Perhaps the worst of a story that had started two decades earlier: that day, the yellow party finished third in the general elections, far from the first place that the majority of its leaders took for granted a short time ago. That day was a true catastrophe for its members, as was reflected for posterity in the faces of Patricia Bullrich, Mauricio Macri and María Eugenia Vidal in the bunker in Parque Norte. In that scenario, the serious expression of someone whom Diego Santilli had brought into space, the economist José Luis Espert, also appeared.
“El Colo”, however, did not allow the tough defeat to hit his spirit. The day after the electoral fiasco he spent glued to his phone, and he spoke to every contact he could think of to see who could give him the number of a member of the leadership of La Libertad Avanza. Santilli had a problem: unlike what happens to this old sea dog with 99 percent of politics, he had never exchanged a word with any of the libertarians. From River, the club that his father presided over during the ’80s, they gave him Guillermo Francos’ phone number. “Guillermo, I’m Diego Santilli. I want to tell you that I am available to you for whatever you need.” The answer took him by surprise. “What are you doing, old man? I think you have the wrong number. I’m not Guillermo Francos,” an anonymous citizen told him.
At that precise moment a story began to be woven that lasted until Santilli became, through narco-scandal and chaos, the libertarian candidate for Buenos Aires and then Minister of the Interior. Until Karina Milei, his now sponsor within the Government, pushed him to replace Espert and then Francos, “el Colo” accumulated, behind closed doors in politics and especially in the PRO, anecdotes of all kinds but that had the same beginning, middle and end: Santilli wanting to get closer to LLA and being false. Or, some acid observer would say, in something close to ridiculous: dozens of private messages to Javier Milei without a response, or a bitter negotiation with his sister, at the beginning of the year. There Santilli would have started by asking for first place on the Buenos Aires list (“I’m going over from the PRO, but I have to be the head of the list”), but in the face of repeated refusals from the general secretary (“you come over and then we’ll see”) he would have ended in an unconditional surrender (“I’ll go over, then tell me where I can go”). Perhaps it is all gossip on the part of those who were hurt by him within the yellow party – a list headed by Macri himself – but it does not matter: the truth is that scenes of this style spread at this time like wildfire in the corridors of power.
