Carlos Alberto Solarithe Indian, died carrying a contradiction that he never wanted to resolve: the artist who for decades preached distance with power ended up being one of the most disputed—and most explicitly assumed—cultural emblems of the Kirchnerism. That tension, between the autonomy that he claimed for his work and the hugs that he gave over the years to the Peronist coalition that he still commands. Cristina Fernández de Kirchnerdefines his political profile more clearly than any statement he makes about art or death.
Solari always resisted the label of the militant artist. He repeated it in dozens of interviews, with variations but with a fixed idea: when a musician is active, his work becomes a pamphlet, and that doesn’t do anyone any good. It was a position that coexisted, however, with an increasingly less hidden sympathy towards Kirchnerist Peronism.
During the golden years of Cristina’s government, The Air Conditioning Fundamentalists They accompanied that political cycle with a discreet but eloquent presence. In a recital prior to the guitar solo of the emblematic “Jijiji”, Solari even exclaimed from the stage the name of the official propaganda program “6,7,8”a gesture that his Kirchner fans read as an unequivocal sign and that his critics pointed out as the moment in which the myth had taken off the apolitical mask. It was the first time in his career that he made public, from a stage, his support for a government.
Over the years, that bond became more explicit and more organic. Solari unreservedly praised Aníbal Fernández and Guillermo Moreno. The “Lady”, as he called Cristina, became a recurring figure in his interviews: he defended her when the justice system investigated her, questioned the media that questioned her, and pointed out the right as a danger of almost apocalyptic dimensions. “I continue to support Kirchnerism and Peronism because on the other side there is a very great danger,” he said in 2023 in an interview with La Garganta Poderosa.summarizing with that phrase a position that no longer allowed nuances.
The inner circle of Kirchnerism knew how to read it accurately. Marcelo Figueras, writer linked to the space and director of Radio Provincia, was co-author with Indio of Memories that lie a littlethe memoir published in 2019. That friendship was also the bridge to the interview that Solari granted in May 2024 to Horacio Verbitsky —the most influential journalist in the Kirchnerist universe— for the program The Rocket to the Moonbroadcast by AM 530.
In that conversation, which took place in the recording studio of his home in Castelar, the musician was lapidary about Javier Milei: he said that there was a crazy president, that he was surprised that people with completed secondary school believed that the president should be given more time, and that he did not see any possibility of the government ending well. Kirchnerism spread the note with enthusiasm. It was exactly what I needed to hear.
The climax of this symbolic appropriation came in September 2025, when Máximo Kirchner published on his social networks an unpublished photo of Cristina hugging Indio Solari and his wife Virginia. The image was taken during a private meeting in the former president’s apartment at 1111 San José Street.in the Constitución neighborhood, where he is serving his house sentence. Máximo accompanied the publication with a text in which he revealed that it was Solari himself who, some time before the attack on September 1, 2022, had warned that they should take care of Cristina. The anecdote turned the musician into something more than a supporter: it placed him at the very center of the Kirchnerist epic, as a witness and symbolic custodian of his most revered figure. The post was released days before the Buenos Aires elections in September of that year, with an explicit call to vote “as if she were on the list.” El Indio was, by then, much more than a cultural reference of the space: it was an electoral argument.
His songs, for their part, had had a political life of their own that preceded his statements by decades. The Redondos’ lyrics, built on the experience of the margins, the accumulated anger and an aesthetic that mixed surrealism with street slang, were adopted by Kirchnerism as the soundtrack of its story about the excluded and the restitution of rights. “Jijiji”, “Todo un palo”, “La bestia pop” were played at political events, at campaign closings, on giant screens in front of crowds. Solari himself had reflected on that constitutive ambiguity of his verses: “The song does not exhaust its resonances,” he once said. But Kirchnerism did choose a resonance, and he did not reject it.
In recent years, already retired from the stage due to the progression of Parkinson’s, Solari continued producing songs and granting selective interviews, almost always with interlocutors from the same ideological ecosystem. The image of the retired artist in Castelar, recording from the shadows and speaking with Verbitsky or Figueras, was the last version of a bond that was never completely institutional but was not casual either. Kirchnerism needed it as a symbol of cultural legitimacy; He needed them, perhaps, to continue feeling on the side of those he called the soulless.
