“Fred” Machado, the businessman arrested and accused of links with the drug trafficking that financed the campaign of José Luis Espert in 2019, shares a lawyer with President Javier Milei. Both the libertarian and Machado leader currently have Francisco Oneto as a lawyer. Machado is defended in the case of his drug ties and the president, in various causes, including the files initiated by the libertarian against Elisa Carrió and the losestone Fabián Doman.
In the libertarian ecosystem, Oneto occupies a unique place. Criminal lawyer graduated from the UBA in 2012, a media reputation was forged long before having access to the Casa Rosada. “Lawyer God”, as his videos on social networks went viral, he was a candidate for Buenos Aires Vice Governor in 2023 accompanying Carolina Píparo, leads a cycle in official streaming Cajo and became the man of legal confidence of Javier Milei after the departure of Diego Spagnuolo, protagonist of the audios scandal in the Andis cause.
Oneto gained space for his frontal and provocative style. In the corridors of Comodoro Py it does not have good reputation: judges and secretaries describe it as a “mounted” lawyer, more concerned with public repercussion than by technical rigor. That media imprint led him to capitalize on the political air favorable to the government, although he also exposed it to procedural transpiés. An example was recorded in August 2025: by appealing a judicial decision in a lawsuit of Milei against the journalist Carlos Pagni, he made an elementary mistake. The brief was only his digital signature as a sponsorship, without the rubric of the complainant himself, basic demand for such writings. The Federal Chamber had to declare it “not presented” by inadmissible. Paradoxically, days later, the presidential defense managed to channel the procedure with a new resource before the Chamber of Cassation that was admitted. For many in court, more than expertise, Oneto had a small political aid.
His curriculum as a lawyer is marked by resonant causes. He was a defender of Leonardo Cositorto in the Generation Zoe case, where he came to admit in a debate on Twitter Space who had hired him “to defend a scam”, a phrase that made him a trend and symbol of his stark style. He represented Luciano Mallemaci in the case of the “Chubut pack”, defended Daniel Lagosta -counted by the femicide of Soriano Érica -, already Máximo Thomsen, one of the rugbiers sentenced by the crime of Fernando Báez Sosa in Villa Gesell. In June 2025 he added another strong name: Leopoldo Luque, the doctor charged with the death of Diego Maradona, in a play that many interpreted as an attempt to shield defense with someone close to libertarian power.
It was already said that Oneto assumed the representation of Federico “Fred” Machado, an entrepreneur accused in the United States to wash 550 million dollars of drug trafficking and detained in Neuquén since 2021. Oneto leads the strategy to curb his extradition, with resources that reached the Supreme Court and that keep the businessman in household prison in his mother’s house in Viedma. Machado became famous in politics for financing the campaign of José Luis Espert in 2019, as this magazine revealed. He even lent his private plane to the candidate and took out a selfie with the background aircraft, which illustrates this note. Machado has already been stopped for a definition of his extradition for about four years. In this file, who takes day to day is the partner of Oneto, Roberto Rallin.
Oneto, in parallel, accompanied Milei in several judicial battles. He defended him in the complaints of slander and public intimidation that he faced in the campaign, intervened as an agent in the complaint for illegal espionage against former police officer Ariel Zanchetta and put himself in charge of the legal strategy in the file for the cryptocurrency $ Libra, promoted by Milei himself in February of this year. There, Oneto held on social networks that the president had been “deceived” and that “if a president wanted to commit crimes, he would not leave all the fingers stuck.” Their interventions were read as a political containment operation as well as a legal movement.
Beyond the courts, Oneto feeds his profile with statements that usually touch the scandal. In 2024 he was repudiated by homophobic comments (“homosexuals must be cured”) and in March 2025 he stirred the controversy by stating that, in the face of social protests, the government should “decree the state of siege” to “end problems.” He also played with the word “process” and lit alarms for the implicit claim of the dictatorship. In September of this year, since the damn, he redoubled the bet with misogynistic statements: “The woman has to stay in the house and the man work”, which caused a transverse rejection of leaders, feminist groups and human rights organizations. Oneto against all.
This repertoire of causes, errors and outburst consolidated a paradox: Oneto is central to the libertarian structure because it expresses what others silence and because it is willing to defend Milei on each front, even at the expense of reputational costs. They do not favor his technical background or judicial consideration, but the closeness he has with the government. In its double role as a lawyer and polemicist, it embodies the mixture of provocation and armor that characterizes the libertarian ruling.
