“I think democracy has many mistakes.” The phrase is by Javier Milei, in an interview with Luciana Geuna at the end of 2021. He said after the journalist to challenge him three times about whether he “believed” in this system of government, hoping to find an affirmative response that never arrived. There are many who think that prayer was one of the many outbursts that always characterized the economist. Those who believe that do not know the libertarian.
It is that this reflection was far from an oversight, but is one of the deepest postulates of anarchococapitalism, to which Milei ascribes. Both its founder, Murray Rothbard, and his most famous disciple, Hans-Herman Hoppe, dedicated a lot of work to criticize this system. Although Rothbard postulates him in his canonical “towards a new freedom” -which could be the equivalent of the “communist manifesto” for a Marxist -it is his German student who most elaborated the idea. So much that he made a book called “Democracy, the God who failed.” “Under democracy, personal property becomes attainable by others. The majority will try to enrich themselves at the expense of the minor Hoppe, who postulates that this form of government leads to some kind of communism. For the writer it would be necessary to seek the disappearance of the State and those who handle it, leaving the market with a total control of the economy and political life. Milei’s reproaches list to the limits imposed by the division of powers is long and could continue, for example with the public support it gave to the anti -democratic uprisings in the Capitol and in Brazil.
In that sense, it could be understood at the 15 months of the government of the most famous anarchocapitalist in the world as the development of a bracelet between what Milei believes and what Milei can, his theoretical framework versus the limits imposed by reality. It is a duel that the president usually synthesizes in his phrase “I am crazy but not boludo”, and whose result depends the 45 million Argentines. However, if the disappearance of democracy and the institutions that shape it is the final objective of the libertarian, which is also pushed by the intimate conviction of believing a chosen by God, there is a question that is imposed: at what exact point of that route is the country? The episodes of recent months, from the executive governing decrees to an uncontrolled repression – in a literal sense – that ended with an injured photographer of extreme gravity, they propose that Rotbhard’s wet dream and Hoppe approaches to a firm step. And with boots noise.
Maze
Threats of “repression” in the high speakers of the train stations and on the screens. An excessive security operation, which almost ends in the murder of a photographer and in blows to an 81 -year -old retiree. And the minister’s refusal to investigate the agents who breached the protocol and that almost end the life of Pablo Grillo.
The action of the forces that Patricia Bullrich commands is authoritarian in the discursive and aesthetics, with scenes that sometimes seem taken from “1984”, George Orwell’s book. However, reality is much more raw than what is seen on the surface. It went almost unnoticed in the middle of the daily drama in which he is involved Argentina a long time ago, but since he assumed in his position the minister has been carrying a determined policy that points to one place: change the logic with which the security forces work, transform their condition of being “auxiliaries” of the Judiciary – that is, that they respond to the decision of a judge or a prosecutor – to be an entity with autonomy and power. And that, on top of that, they have a loose hand.
Bullrich began that path to days of the new government, when he promulgated the famous “antipiquet protocol.” All lights of that measure were carried out by the decision to prohibit street cuts, that security operations begin to be paid by organizations that marched and the elimination of the norm that prevented agents from having firearms near a mobilization. But there was something background that changed that day: from that decree it was resolved that the forces can act without a court order, arguing that the marches are a “flagrant crime.”
Can
If an authoritarian government is defined based on how many attributions from the rest of the State’s powers the Executive cries out for itself, what Bullrich is doing could be defined in that regard. It is that since then all the steps that the minister took were to get justice. In June he published Decree 496, which gave him the power to incorporate the Public Registry of Persons and Entities related to acts of terrorism and financing (repet) to “every human, legal person or entity” on which “had reasons founded to suspect that it is linked to a real or potential external threat to national security.” That is, now Bullrich and his ministry can register any person or organization in the list of terrorists, which, reached in the penalty, aggravates the justice before justice. That happened as the Government began to call “terrorists” those who marched against the ruling -as the Ministry of Security did during the protests for the approval of the Base Law, in that same month -, and since then they already registered, for example, to the ancestral resistance Mapuche (RAM) in that registry.
But Bullrich didn’t stay there. In January of this year, Congress approved, at his request, the law “antimaphia”, inspired by the rich law that American films usually promote. Thanks to this change, any person considered part of a “mafia” by his ministry can – with the authorization of a prosecutor – to be arrested for up to 30 days for “crime investigation” and even, without conviction, seize any good that is suspected of being related to that alleged mafia.
Carlos Manfroni, Chief of Cabinet of Bullrich, said in a note in Infobae: “If the arrests are multiplied, it is due to the fact that the current criminal regime prevented them from being made.” This message becomes disturbing when the government’s reaction is seen before Judge Karina Andrade, who decided to release the 114 arrested for the march of Wednesday 12 -according to her, because they were arrested in a context of extreme irregularities -or what happened with the 33 people arrested after the protest of the Bases Law -where some of them were arrested without conviction for more than a month in a common jail. Will Bullrich and Milei begin to consider any opponent to their government as “mafia” or “terrorist”? Will these figures use as excuses to stop without evidence? Is the ultimate search to cancel the right to protest?
These are questions that float. Guillermo Torremare, vice president of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights (APDH), told Profile that “a combo of legal instruments typical of an authoritarian state is being generated.” Sabina Frederic, former Minister of Security during the management of Alberto Fernández, is more categorical. “Bullrich wants the sum of public power,” he tells this medium.
“Rat nest”
This advance is also seen in Congress. Milei appointed two judges of the Supreme Court by decree. In that same way he took new debt to the IMF, although the law established that a loan with the fund should be first voted.
The degradation of power and the importance of that leg of the Republic is central to any authoritarian government: from Hitler’s Germany to El Salvador de Bukele. Milei drives that unpacking in different ways. One is discursive and aesthetic. Insult Congress in speeches and interviews, qualifying it as “parasites” or different animals, and shares in the memes networks where you see how a lion throws gas at the rats in the enclosure. The other is ruling through decrees, to which it could be added what happens when it is obliged to go through Congress.
The cases of Edgardo Kueider and his dollars and Lucía Crexell and the promised embassy in Paris open great questions about how the government manages to operate the legislative power when it fails to avoid it. There is also the case of what Martín Menem did on Wednesday 12, the day they almost killed Congress out of Congress: the president of the Chamber suddenly lifted a session against every regulation, for fear of losing a vote. “Menem wants to take the entire institution,” said Marcela Pagano, libertarian deputy in the sight of Karinism, in C5N.
Speech
Milei’s advanced authoritarian, which for what he said was always latent, has been accelerating since Donald Trump triumphed in the United States elections in November. Since then, the president associated homosexuality with pedophilia, said that “we had to be willing to give life for the cause”, in that battle that is “good against evil, and with evil it is not negotiated, crushes it” and even asked Axel Kicillof to give up his role as governor. But, he said, another option would be to intervene Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, he continues to treat the one who thinks different from “shit left -handed” and “sick of the soul”, which in the background implies the suppression of the other and enables scenes like those that were seen in the last repressions: a hydrant of the police inciting protesters to the fight to the shout of “left -handed come”.
Milei does not operate only in that regard. Next to Santiago Caputo, whom he has been threatening physically and verbally to a national deputy. From the beginning of the year the star advisor began to include in the surveys that the Casa Rosada asks for a list that says “in which country do you prefer to live?” and whose options are “a country with a democratic government that respects the individual rights of people” or “a country with an authoritarian government that achieves good economic results.”
That antidemocratic caputo reefs appears in the bulk of the posts he does with his accounts – each time less anonymous – in the networks. “Javier Gerardo Milei would never agree to be declared emperor of the new Argentine empire. It is exactly because it is imperative that it be,” Caputo posted on December 30, 2024. It is one of the many publications that made the strategist in that sense -calls him “philosopher king, César of the Argentine empire” and usually signs his texts with “Ave, milei” Artificial where the president dressed as Napoleon or Emperor is seen. This anti -democratic rhetoric is very repeated by the libertarian hard core, especially by Caputo. Needless to say, Milei, who believes to be a chosen one of God, sees with pleasure this type of theories.
Being clear, then, what is the orientation that the ruling has been demonstrating, it would be necessary to resolve the enigma of how society can react. Roberto Gargarella, lawyer and sociologist, is not optimistic in that regard. “Unfortunately, the conditions are given for an authoritarian movement to take place. Society is economically fragmented and that gives the context for social anger. With which Milei may leave, but the germ of authoritarianism is,” he says.
Roberto Nunes, author of “Bolsononarism and extreme global right”, deepens how the complex moment of the world favors the growth of these logics: “If competition rises to the foundation of life and the struggle for survival in the market, it is equated with natural selection, it can be expected that for many the force becomes the only law and success in the only criteria. This makes legal or moral restrictions appear as limitations to the freedom compete”. There is the most serious: Milei’s authoritarian phase can find an echo in this country overwhelmed by so many crises.
