Javier Milei is frantic. He walks from one side to the other in the spacious room he occupies on the 21st floor of the Hotel Libertador. He is without shoes, in stockings, and with a black lump in the hand. While he moves he does not stop talking, and emphasizes his ideas with his hands, which go up and down without stopping. In the suite he installed a large blackboard, as if he were still a television economist and not the elected President. On that board he makes and breaks numbers, he draws arrows, equations, he explains, he argues with himself. He becomes obsessed.
The topic that is most on your mind today it is no longer dollarizationthe closure of the Central Bank, the increasingly strained alliance it has with Mauricio Macri, the weakly armed man who is rushing to make his future cabinet, nor the first measures to be taken barely sits in Rivadavia’s chair. It is another, which has six letters but which today monopolizes the mind of the incoming president: Leliqs.
“It’s the economy’s bomb, they left me a bomb, we have to disarm this bomb,” he repeats over and over again as he walks through the hotel room. To understand the designation of Luis “Toto” Caputo In the Ministry of Economy we have to start here. For Milei, it is the former Macrismo Finance Secretary who brought him the best plan to defuse “the bomb”, one that curiously the new official contributed to creating.
He “Messi of finance”, as the former Macrista Chief of Staff Marcos Peña baptized him, connected with that sensitive fiber of the libertarian, which in recent months was gaining ground among all his fears. But it is a high risk bet. For Milei, for Caputo and, above all, for Argentina. The future is just a big unknown.
Alliance on the edge
“By 2023 they will be together, guys, don’t get so attached.” That’s what Caputo told him in November 2021, a few days before the legislative elections in which Milei got 17%, to Martín Tetaz and the liberal economist Miguel Boggiano. They were fighting precisely over the figure of the libertarian, and the former secretary came in to mediate. “Javier has a lot of merit,” he concluded his idea. It was a prophecy that ended up being fulfilled, at least in the logic that La Libertad Avanza and the PRO came closer in the last stretch of the campaign.
This anecdote matches a reality that is beginning to appear on the libertarian horizon. It is the one that marks that the distance with Macri begins to grow – something that NOTICIAS maintained as soon as the “Acasusso Pact”-, and not only that: it was not the former president who pushed his former official to the position he is going to occupy now.
Except for a person extremely trusted by the former president, who when asked by this media maintains that it was he who “suggested” the name “Toto”, the rest of the sources consulted – not only from LLA but also from the PRO – assure that the engineer had nothing to do with the appointment. And even more: that Macri found out that there were talks between Caputo and Milei long after they began. “And that didn’t sit well with Mauricio at all,” says one of his friends.
There is a double dimension of problems here. The first: Luis Caputo is Nicolás’ brother, the historic “soul brother” of Macri – with whom he is now going through some moments of tension -, and is a close friend of the former president. “Toto” and Mauricio strengthened the bond during the administration, and the new minister even has a house in Cumelén, two away from the one owned by the founder of the PRO.
They spend entire summers there. But the second dimension of the problem is the most important. Macri and several of her circle feel that Milei is not playing “right” with them. That she is not sufficiently valuing the media and logistical support – and also monetary, via the businessmen who contributed to the campaign – that they gave her in the last stretch of the campaign. To put it into Creole: among others, Macri asked for the Ministry of Justice for Germán Garavano and control of YPF – a company that interests him more and more since he began to forge ties with the Qataris and the Arabs – to Javier Iguacel.
Not only did they not give him anything, but he had to swallow a double burden: seeing one of his own jump sides and, in addition, having to bear the costs of that step. The thing is that, despite what these pages report, the majority of society seems to accept that “Toto” was hired by Macri, as is commonly believed. Patricia Bullrichsomething that is also far from true.
It is to be hoped that, if things do not go well – and even Milei himself predicts “six very hard months” and then until “two years of stagflation”-, many look at the former president as the great culprit. Who is going to pay for the damage?
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