Nobody saw, nobody knew and nobody heard anything. The creation and disappearance of the Argentine Resilience Unit is a mystery that nobody wants to take responsibility for in the Casa Rosada, as if it were a magic trick that went wrong and that it is better to forget. A name that nobody stopped at in days of institutional vertigo, a lack of communication between officials that is now routine in this government, a minister who does not want to be stuck with an idea that he swears does not belong to him, a failed candidate who he knows everyone involved and a misstep that escalated into a national scandal. But in this fleeting tragicomedy of entanglements, NEWS was able to find the only thing that is clear.: the idea was born by direct order from Alberto Fernández.
Distorted
Several had commented on the idea to the President. The plan was to create a specific unit that works on public policies to address mental health problems. That was the original idea, later covered by the memes, by a line that spoke of creating it to “improve social humor” that was taken for the joke and also by the fact that the measure was not sustained even for one day. That plan had come to Alberto during the height of the pandemic, when the mental consequences of confinement worried many, but it took a long time between the twists and turns of complex management. In December he had a brief conversation with an old acquaintance of his, Fernando Melillo, who had been number two within the albertista Environment portfolio during the K administration, and told him that he was going to approve the creation of the Unit. But several things went wrong.
“The name lent itself to the joke, and the timing was lousy. PBut the mess was so much on Monday that this happened to us, and in fact we did not know that this Unit was going to be created, ”they clarify from the Chief of Staff by Juan Manzur. This area was the one that signed the measure in the Official Gazette, on Monday the 14th, and all eyes pointed to Tucuman when the issue began to escalate. On top of that, Manzur has just gone through a similar situation: in mid-February, his leadership approved the appointment of Claudia Bello, a Menemist, another appointment that sparked a scandal and was ultimately rescinded. In both cases, the Headquarters disregards the intellectual authorship. In the last one they even put as proof that on the Monday in question they spent the whole day in the Senate, defending the agreement with the IMF together with Martín Guzmán. “My cell phone exploded with the Resilience thing and I didn’t even know what they were talking about,” says a Manzur collaborator. As with memes, it is to laugh so as not to cry: the situation speaks of the course of management.
There were also several looks pointing at the Legal and Technical Secretariat led by Vilma Ibarra. Like all the decrees signed by Alberto or his ministers, it is his area that prepares them. How is it that Vilma, seasoned in her own, did not make the political calculation? “It’s that the order came from very high up”, is the response that is heard in the corridors of La Rosada, where they point to Alberto although they prefer not to name him. Perhaps the Ibarra thing has some other dimension: his brother, Aníbal, celebrated in his networks. “Melillo voted in favor of my dismissal, now it seems barbaric to me that he has not taken office,” said the former mayor, confirming that some grudges can last a long time.
Resilience
The word that inspired the failed undersecretary comes from Latin and means “jumping back in.” “It also has the meaning of ‘separate’ or ‘deviate’, something interesting so as not to forget the horizon of social exclusion that determines the subject”. The one who wrote the last lines was Aldo Melillo, one of the heroes of Argentine psychoanalysis, a specialist in his field who always understood, like Ramón Carillo, that health also included a social and political dimension. He makes sense with his own biography: Melillo was one of those who joined the ranks of Peronism during the seventies, militancy for which he had to go into exile in Mexico in 1980.
Fernando, his eldest son, was crossed by both passions. On the one hand he turned to psychology, a career that he finished great at the University of Belgrano -presenting a thesis on “Resilience and intersubjectivity”-, and on the other he embraced Peronism since he was a child. He was in Ezeiza during the tragic return of Perón, and he was also seen in the Plaza, when the General kicked out the “beardless”. Then Fernando was active in “JP La Lealtad”, the dismemberment of Montoneros that originated after the rupture with the then President. By the time he went into exile in Mexico with his father, he was 20 years old.
With the return to democracy, he joined the ranks of the renewal of the JP. There he established a very close relationship with Patricia Bullrich, who was beginning to step strong within the Peronist youth. It is seen that tango was right and indeed “things change over the years”: the current president of the PRO charged hard against the Unit in her networks, an action for which she received, in private, several recriminations from Peronists who have known both since then. then. In the 1990s, Melillo became Undersecretary of Buenos Aires Youth during Carlos Grosso’s administration, years in which he organized several public festivals on July 9. By the time Néstor Kirchner triumphed, he was the president of the Buenos Aires ARI of Carrió. That memory resurfaced these days and fell heavy in the frontist militancy, even though the protagonist of this note had broken with “Lilita” to join Kirchnerism in 2008. In any case, now his future is uncertain. In the Headquarters they say that the Unit was disaffected, and there is a version that it could be integrated into the Ministry of Health. Melillo will have to assert his expertise on the subject to “jump back in.”
