Before dying, Claudio Caputo left five farewell letters. One for each of his children: Francisco, Santiago, Ezequiel and Malena, and also a fifth for Sebastián Amerio, for whom he had a special affection for being a family friend from a very young age. In each of these writings he left praise and some advice for his heirs. Francisco, being the oldest, obtained a text with more responsibilities than the rest and the feeling that from that moment on he would become the new patriarch of the family. Santiago was always the most rebellious, so his letter, witnesses say, would have more recommendations than for the rest of his brothers. In his brief and heartfelt text, Amerio received a message that he tries to fulfill every day: “Take care of Santiago,” Claudio told the friend of Milei’s star advisor.
Today the world of Santiago Caputo is configured in this way: Francisco functions as a paterfamilias, whom he respects and consults, and Amerio is the squire who watches his back.
This trident has been in the sights of Karinism for a long time, especially of the cousins Martín and “Lule” Menem, who, through Juan Bautista Mahiques, and with the permission of the President’s sister, have already moved on Amerio, by removing him from the Ministry of Justice, and now they are going after Francisco, who had a leading role in the launch of the Faro Foundation, the Mileista think tank that raises millions of dollars from the private sector to spread the ideas of the Government.
In its origins, at the beginning of 2024, the Faro Foundation began organizing dinners to raise funds and the coordination of those events was in charge of Francisco, who also served as fundraiser, according to the testimonies that businessmen quietly spread in those days. They maintained that it was Francisco Caputo who called them to invite them and tell them how much the cover cost: about 25 thousand dollars. There was no invoice. Santiago, meanwhile, serves as political godfather of the foundation.
Francisco is one year and six months older than Santiago, he is 42, he went to the same Manuel Belgrano School and built his adult life away from militancy, dedicated to ontological coaching. On his Instagram he presented himself as a trainer of “Super Humans” and organized his speech around words like “human potential”, “consciousness”, “transformation” and “trainings”. In a 2019 interview with his colleague Martín Daulerio, he maintained that there is nothing that can be bought with money that cannot be bought with confidence, and explained that the lack of money usually responds to a lack of self-confidence. That same man ended up in charge of calling businessmen to charge them for the cover for Faro dinners.
Francisco assumed control of the offices of the family notary’s office on Córdoba Street. Those offices were the foundation’s first headquarters used to raise money for Milei’s campaign. A few remember her. It was called the Institute for Growth and was managed by the failed Chief of Staff Nicolás Posse. It was the predecessor of the Faro Foundation.
At the beginning of Milei’s management, Francisco visited his brother in the Casa Rosada offices with some frequency. Later, those visits became less frequent and they even began to meet outside.
Neither of them appears as an official government official. In the private sector, they share the same employer on paper: Lucas Costa, an SME businessman who has been a friend of the family since childhood and a resident of the country Martindale. Costa has two companies, Zefico SA, which employs Santiago, and Camalu SA, which employs Francisco, and which would be in charge of managing the Caputos’ assets. In matters of power and money, Santiago and Francisco are the same thing.
Clin, box! Francisco shares with his brother an aversion to public exposure, and there is almost no documentation that ties him to the foundation. The one who exposed it was Alberto Benegas Lynch Jr., who, when celebrating the launch of the foundation in X, thanked the effective coordination of “Fran Caputo.” When Santiago saw the tweet, he snorted and stammered “it can’t be.” One of the untouchables of Argentine liberalism had belled the cat.
That structure that Francisco helped set up is now the target of an organization under the control of Karinism. The General Inspection of Justice (IGJ), which regulates legal entities, called on the Faro Argentina Foundation to report who are the donors who would have contributed around $5 billion during 2024, according to the newspaper La Nación.
This request is the first sign of tension between the two factions of the ruling party around the Faro Foundation, which has already become the largest private political financing machine in the libertarian space, which in turn has spent – through the foundation – more than 1.2 billion pesos on political advertising on networks since its origins until the closing of this edition. The information comes from the Meta advertising platform, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. The website used to viralize content is called Official Ratio and, according to Meta metrics, it is the second most invested in the entire history of Facebook Argentina, just behind the government of Córdoba.
The complete note in this edition of NEWS.
