The governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillofspent a good part of Sunday at the José María Gatica Sports Center in Villa Dominico, where from the early hours of the morning thousands of people lined up to say goodbye to Carlos “Indian” Solari. He was there from eight in the morning until noon, he toured the burning chapel, greeted fans and the workers of the operation deployed by the Province and ended the day speaking with Tuny Kollmann on Radio 10, late at night, with a balance that he defined in a single word: satisfied.
“It was an obligation,” said Kicillof when asked about the decision to make provincial resources available to organize the wake. The governor explained that as soon as he learned of the musician’s death, he acted on two simultaneous levels: the personal level, as a lifelong fan, and the institutional level, informing the family that the Province was available to host the farewell anywhere in its territory. The family chose Avellanedaand the operation was set up in a few hours. Security, health, Civil Defense and firefighters deployed a scheme that included three medical assistance posts and a pedestrian entry system from Bartolomé Miter Avenue, with exit through another sector of the property to guarantee permanent circulation.
The choice of location was neither casual nor easy. The Casa Rosada ruled out the possibility of the wake taking place at the headquarters of the Executive or in Congress, arguing that “the guarantees were not given.” Officials from Javier Milei’s government offered Tecnópolis, but acknowledged that they were unable to establish contact with the musician’s family. It was in this context that the Gatica Sports Center, in the municipality of Avellaneda led by Peronism, ended up being the chosen setting. The death of Indio Solari activated contacts that were frozen in Peronism and led to coordination between Kicillof and Máximo Kirchner to organize the last goodbye.
“As soon as I found out, the first thing I did was communicate by all possible means that the place that the family chose in the province of Buenos Aires, be it here in La Plata, we offered several places, or anywhere in the Province, we were going to make available, as we are doing, security, health, Civil Defense, firefighters, we are carrying out an operation that is really very significant, very important, because we knew that this was going to be a true, popular, mass farewell,” the governor explained.
The result exceeded any previous estimate. Kicillof calculated that at the time of the night interview around 200,000 people had passed through the burning chapel, at a rate of 15,000 per hour, with ten kilometers of queue that did not let up throughout the day. The musician’s family brought peace of mind to the crowd by making it clear that the wake would not end until the last fan had been able to say goodbye: “There is room for everyone who wants to give shape to their goodbye,” they officially expressed. Kicillof confirmed that same decision on the radio: as long as people continued to arrive, the doors would remain open.
In the radio interview, the governor also spoke as a fanatic. He remembered having had all of the Redondos albums since they came out, in the mid-80s, at a time that coincided with the formation of his own musical taste. He mentioned Indio’s last recital at the Estadio Único in La Plata as one of the most significant moments of his life, which he attended with his children and friends in his capacity as governor. “El Indio came out through a video, but well, he ended up being the last one,” he recalled. He also revealed having had a personal meeting with Solari in 2019, when Parkinson’s was already declared. “A man, an artist of immense strength,” he said.
When asked by host Tuny Kollmann about the cost of the operation — ironically compared to the security deployment that the national government sets up every Wednesday in front of the retiree marches — Kicillof chose not to enter into the controversy and move into emotional territory. “There was a bad evaluation of some sectors, but that is not what I want to discuss now,” he said, in a veiled allusion to the criticism generated by the use of public resources for the event. What he wanted to convey, he said, was something else: the importance of saying goodbye, of respecting the family, and of honoring what Indio Solari represented for a generation—and for the cultural history of the country.
The closing of his story was the image he took with him from the funeral chapel during the hours he spent there: a crowd breaking down in front of the musician’s remains. “The word I heard the most was thank you,” Kicillof said. That word contains, at the same time, the mourning of a generation, the magnitude of a cultural phenomenon that far exceeded the limits of music and the political dimension of a farewell that Kirchnerism knew how to read, organize and lead when the national government could not—or did not want—to do so.
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