There are questions that a society cannot answer while it is crying. Only when the crying subsides, when the flags are folded, is it possible to look at what happened. Carlos Alberto Solari died on Friday, June 5, at his home in Parque Leloir, at the age of 77, from a hemorrhagic stroke. And what happened next was not simply a mass duel. It was a social phenomenon that deserves to be read with more care than the emotion of the moment allows.
Let’s start with the numbers, because the numbers in this case speak volumes. An estimated flow of 15,000 people per hour in front of the coffin. Nearly a million people filled the streets of Avellaneda from Sunday until the early hours of Monday. Before that, on the same Friday afternoon, different groups of fans arrived from different parts of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area to participate in a spontaneous farewell in Plaza de Mayo that quickly gained mass. And not only in Buenos Aires: in La Plata, in Mar del Plata, in Rosario, in Paraná, the musician’s hometown, spontaneous ricotera masses were held in the heart of each city. A Canadian influencer who was in Buenos Aires and filmed the scene in Plaza de Mayo summed up his perplexity in a phrase that went viral: “You don’t know if it’s the apocalypse or a celebration.”
Exactly. That’s what it was: both at the same time. And that ambiguity is not anecdotal. It is, strictly speaking, the key to understanding what that crowd was really saying goodbye to.
Because there is something that should be said clearly from the beginning: no one summoned anyone. “Here, no one summons us, no one indoctrinates us. We grabbed the truck and we came,” said one of the attendees in Plaza de Mayo. The line in Avellaneda formed spontaneously, without a fence to organize it in its entirety, although of course there was a state organization that worked to prosecute.
At noon on Sunday the line already exceeded 50 blocks. And there was no device, there was no paid transportation, there was no list of adherents. There were simply people who decided to go. And that, in the Argentina of 2026, is in itself a political fact of the first order, although politics had nothing to do with the call.
In a country where political representation is going through one of its deepest crises, where traditional parties have fragmented to the point of not recognizing each other, where the leader of the moment built his power precisely on the promise of destroying everything that existed before, a community of a million people organized alone, in silence, without acronyms, to say goodbye to a man who never wanted to be anyone’s leader. That paradox deserves attention.
The wake of Indio Solari exposed a central tension of the Argentine present: while the political system is experiencing difficulties in consolidating stable representations, cultural communities capable of mobilizing belongings, emotions and senses of identity on a large scale persist. What Avellaneda revealed is not that rock has more power than politics. What it revealed is that there are social bonds that politics can no longer articulate, and that these bonds found their meeting place for decades in the Indio’s recitals.
And that’s where politics comes in, through the back door, with its characteristic clumsiness. The Casa Rosada ruled out the possibility that the wake would take place at the headquarters of the Executive or in the National Congress, where they argued that “the guarantees are not given.”
On the other hand, Kicillof did not waste the moment. The negotiation between the governor and Máximo Kirchner to organize the popular farewell in Avellaneda thawed a political relationship crossed by a tense distance between both leaders. Collective pain as lubricant for the Peronist internal. El Indio, who never entered any electoral ring, unintentionally ended up being the scene of a political reconciliation that was pending of another nature. Kicillof organized the operation, was present, and finished the day with a phrase that is already circulating as a slogan: “If it is not provoked or screwed up, the crowd will organize.” Truth and opportunism in equal parts.
But the crowd, it must be said, belonged to no one. The scene in Avellaneda left an image of high symbolic density: a diverse crowd, sustained for hours in the rain, organized without visible party mediations and mobilized by a cultural identification that transcends political situations. There were the usual ricoteros, the children of ricoteros, those who never went to a recital but knew every lyric, those who came from provinces that Solari never visited. A heterogeneity that politics has not been able to summon for a long time.
There is an Argentine tradition of funerals that become something else. Those of Gardel, those of Perón, those of Maradona. Each of these massive duels was also, in its own way, an x-ray of the society that starred in them. Solari’s is no exception. But it has a peculiarity that the previous ones did not have to the same extent: the dead man was someone who actively refused to be a symbol of something that was not his own work. Who never spoke on behalf of anyone. Who stayed in the shadows when the cameras were pointed. And yet, or perhaps precisely because of that, it ended up representing something that a million people felt was their own.
What that crowd was saying goodbye to was not just a musician. He was saying goodbye to a form of belonging that he no longer knows where to find. A type of community bond that politics does not offer, that the market cannot sell, that social networks simulate without producing. The Indian never wanted to be the leader of that tribe. But the tribe chose him anyway, and continued to choose him even though he left the stage in 2017 and even though Parkinson’s kept him away until he became almost inaccessible.
The question that remains, the one that matters beyond grief, is what a society does with that type of collective energy when the object that summoned it is no longer there. If he disperses it, if he tames it, or if he finds, in some unlikely place, a new way of naming himself.
For now, the answer is the silence that follows the last pogo.
