It is Thursday, October 26 and Javier Milei is sitting in the A24 studio. He is uncomfortable.
He sat in the same chair where at the beginning of the year he starred in an event that has now become international. In January she had a lapse when that channel’s production showed, without prior notice, a photo of her English mastiff. “There’s Conan,” she repeated then, as if wrapped in a kind of trance. These days, the American comedian John Oliver reproduced that scene with the historic presenter Conan O’Brien, and they turned it into a sketch that went around the world.
Ten months have passed since then. And some things changed: against all odds, Milei garnered 30 percent of the votes in the primary elections, sent Together for Change to third place in the general elections and today is one of the two people who are in the race to govern the country. starting December 10.
But for the interview with Esteban Trebucq Milei does not arrive at the best of times. In fact, quite the opposite. In a fact that is difficult to explain at least with political logic, the libertarian entered into an alliance with Mauricio Macri as if he had been the defeated one instead of the PRO. The presence of the former president, within hours, became an uncomfortable fanstama even behind closed doors of La Libertad Avanza. And not only that: Milei was absolutely convinced, through dialogues with God through whom he claims to be his chosen one, that on Sunday, October 22, he was going to win the presidency in the first round. The dizziness he suffers, therefore, is not only strategic, but also personal and mystical.
Milei is seen overwhelmed in the note with Trebucq, just four days after the vote. He first complains about the “murmurs” in the studio, but there is something else: he is out of his mind, off axis. His gestures are not adjusted, and every now and then she moves her lips in a strange way.
The fact quickly begins to be discussed on the networks, but at the end comes the icing on the cake. Trebucq asks him about the unexpected alliance with Bullrich, whom he had called a “child killer” very shortly before.
The crossing that occurs is unusual.
“In front of the Bullrich advertisement I posted a meme. Has anyone seen the metrics? “It has more than 250,000 likes.” “But those are not votes, Javier,” the journalist rebukes him. “But what I want to say is: there are three salamis giving their opinion from a computer… you know what? While they look at the lady on the internet, I am in the middle of their sheets.”
Milei’s response – a linear comparison between a sexual situation and a political alliance – is not only striking for its words, but also for its manner: he moves his eyes a lot, twists his fingers, his voice becomes very serious.
This scene goes around the world in hours. Milei’s emotional stability, a topic that has been discussed for years by NOTICIAS, becomes a great unknown. Can an unstable leader govern a country as unstable as Argentina?
It is a doubt that, furthermore, can only get bigger. What was seen on the A24 screen is just the tip of the iceberg.
Panic show. Milei’s head is a labyrinth, perhaps unfathomable even for himself.
Where did this instability arise? Because?
Although these are questions more appropriate for a mental health specialist, a journalistic look can provide some answers.
The libertarian had a deeply difficult life. Norberto, his father, a bus driver who boasted of walking around with a club next to the seat to deal with difficult passengers, made his childhood a living hell. He beat him for years, and when the blows were not physical they turned into a torment of humiliation. “You’re trash, you’re useless, you’re never going to be of any use,” were the words Milei heard the most in her home in Villa Devoto.
An anecdote perfectly illustrates those years. It is from April 2, 1982, the day the Malvinas War was announced. Milei, watching television, commented that this brawl was surely going to go badly for Argentina, with the certainties that a 12-year-old child can have. Norberto broke out into a kind of patriotic fight and hit him all over the house. Karina, the sister two years younger and involuntary witness, suffered such a strong shock that she ended up hospitalized. From the hospital, Alicia, their mother, called Milei, who had been left alone and beaten in the house. “Your sister is going to die, Javier. And she is going to die because of you,” she told him.
The correlate of this torment is not difficult to imagine. At Cardenal Copello School, where he attended primary and secondary school, Milei was a lonely, isolated boy without friends. “El Loco”, they nicknamed him there, in a school where he suffered bullying.
Was Milei’s instability born in this complex childhood? Or did she come later?
It is another mystery that is difficult to answer precisely, but it is possible to mark a key year. It’s 2017. There would be a before and after.
“Four-legged son.” This is how Milei referred to her dog. She adopted him in 2004, in Córdoba, and, in her words, he became “her true and greatest love.” With Conan she spent 13 Christmases and 13 New Years, in absolute solitude. One glass of champagne was for him and another for the dog.
According to Milei, he was “literally his son.” She spoke about him not only in almost all of her interviews but even at her campaign events.
“How old is he?” Trebucq asked him in January of this year, after the libertarian was embarrassed by seeing the dog. “So many that I can’t count,” he replied. It was a lie? Or does Milei not distinguish reality from what happens in his head?
Hard to know. But the truth is that the animal died in October 2017, after a long agony. He went through this process with a parapsychologist and a telepath who read the dog’s mind and “communicated” it with its owner. The first to come to Milei’s aid in that difficult time was Gustavo, an anarcho-capitalist witch who “worked” for eight months with the economist and his convalescent dog. He acted as “protector” of the animal and “interpreter” between it and its owner.
In mid-August of this year, Gustavo broke the silence. “From an esoteric point of view, both he and I are very important people in the Roman Empire, we are very used to fighting. He is a great person,” said the witcher in a live chat on Twitter.
After Gustavo, another key person for Milei arrived, who would have a lot of influence on his head. It was Celia Melamed, who defines herself as an “interspecies communicator” although in interviews she accepts being simply called a “telapath.” She finished introducing the libertarian to the field of the supernatural, communicating Milei with her dog in the afterlife. And not only that: Melamed would be the one who would train Karina in this discipline. Today Milei’s sister can talk to live and dead animals with the same ease as her mentor, and based on these conversations she makes important decisions.
“My grandchildren”. But the hole left by the absence of his dog-son Conan was such that Milei took a step further, also encouraged by the sorcerer Gustavo. “I programmed him to have five. “Those animals are five power animals, they sustain him energetically,” she said.
He was referring to the five Conan clones that Milei made, which arrived from the United States at the beginning of 2018. He paid “Perpetuate” $50,000 for the animals. The company now remembered him. After he won the PASO, the American company took out an advertisement saying that Milei, “one of our clients,” had come first in the Argentine election.
Those that Milei presents as “my grandchildren” are actually Conan’s clones. With the sorcerer’s thesis, the libertarian became convinced that animals have “powers,” and today he has them divided as if it were a kind of shadow cabinet, with each of them advising him in a specific area.
The clones filled the void left by Conan, although they caused an unexpected problem. English mastiffs can weigh up to 100 kilos and stand 1.80 meters tall. The clones lived in the 100 square meter apartment that the libertarian had in Abasto. As soon as the puppies began to grow, the house became an immense pigsty, and Milei stopped receiving people there. “It’s Kosovo,” she justified as if she were a joke, although she wasn’t. In March 2019, when they were about to turn one year old, he suffered an accident: one of the clones attacked him and bit him. The economist ended up in the hospital and with several stitches.
Unstable. The talk in which the witcher broke the silence was organized by Claudia Oviedo. She was Milei’s friend. In 2018, the libertarian entrusted her with a sensitive task: she had to create and manage a Conan account on the networks, even when the dog was already dead, a fiction they maintained while this adventure lasted. “I knew that Conan was not alive, but what was I going to tell him?” Oviedo said in that talk. Seeing some of the messages that Milei exchanged with the dead dog account generates something similar to a chill. “Thank you very much LOVE OF MY LIFE, no one is bigger than you CONAN, let’s hope the humidity goes down so we can go on a long walk,” she commented on July 29, 2018 on Twitter.
Over time the situation did not improve. In the middle of that year, Milei told her trusted group a striking fact. She said she was in a downtown bookstore when philosopher Ayn Rand – who died in 1982 – “appeared” to her for a talk. These appearances and talks with the dead – with Murray Rothbard, the founder of libertarianism, he says he has frequent dialogues – continued until they reached their climax in 2020. That year was special for Milei: he had a fight with the only friend he ever had, Diego Giacomini, and his therapist also died from Covid, which would lead him to stop taking care of himself. In fact, he was so bad that her sister Karina took him to live with her parents, Vicente López, after that relationship was resettled.
In those pandemic days Milei said he received several visits from God himself. And that it was this who convinced him to do something that he had never wanted to do, that in fact he had been offered in 2019 but that he had rejected: get into politics. “The One told me that I have a mission,” he repeated to whoever wanted to listen. In September of this year, one of his then friends broke the silence on NEWS. It was Mariano Fernández, an economist and professor, who in an article for this medium wrote the following: “Many analysts believe that Milei’s behavior is acting, but the reality is much more complex and dangerous. On repeated occasions he has stated that his actions are illuminated by providence and that his ‘mission’ has been inspired by God.”
Crisis. So, the instability seen in Milei in A24 is not new: it is simply exacerbated, at a time when many eyes are on him. And it makes sense. The libertarian not only suffered the blow of the election in which he did not win, but was added to the fact of having to negotiate hand in hand with Macri. This is a novelty in Milei’s life: until now he did not do politics, he handled himself freely in an ultra-vertical and chaotic party and refused to get deeply involved in issues such as the creation of lists or alliances. Politics never interested him, so now he is entering a new and slippery terrain. These previous weeks of the ballot could become quicksand.
But, beyond his pact with the PRO or his dollarization proposals, the big question is the one that started this note. Can a person who is convinced that he is God’s chosen one govern Argentina? Can someone who thinks that his cloned dogs advise him politically move a country as complex as this one forward? Is someone like him, who believes he has the ability to talk to a dead dog from beyond, capable of improving the lives of 46 million people? The answer will depend on each reader, but simple questions generate fear.
