In his Neura program, Alejandro Fantino sought a direct vision of the reality of Argentines and asked his listeners—with a strong libertarian presence—to share how “things were going” in their daily lives. His expectation, he said on air, was to hear positive and sincere messages from his followers about the situation in the country. “I asked people to give me an honest snapshot of how things are going. I hope there are good messages,” he said before opening the participation.
Far from what was projected, what followed was “a waterfall of messages” loaded with economic and personal frustration. Users reported experiences of falling consumption and lack of resources: “We are increasingly tight. Salaries are not adjusted to reality. There is much less work” and “People no longer use the card for clothing or durable goods. Now they use it for merchandise” were some of the testimonies that Fantino read on the air.
The avalanche of messages also exposed situations of businesses in crisis and family economies on the limit. A worker in the textile sector said that even after converting his production in response to the opening of imports, consumption was still “flat.” From Mar del Plata came another compelling story: “The streets and shops are empty… Very little movement.”
The mood on screen became increasingly bleak, with testimonies including the need to use credit cards only to buy basic foodstuffs and warnings about depleting family incomes. This accumulation of messages, far from reinforcing a narrative of optimism, highlighted a context of “adjustment, fall in consumption, indebtedness and frustration even among voters of the Government itself,” according to the chronicle of the events.
What began as an attempt to generate closeness with his audience ended up becoming a kind of public mirror of the daily crisis: the voices that Fantino put on the air described an Argentina much more tense and complicated than he expected, leaving the host with a more gloomy and disturbing panorama than the original intention of his media survey.
