The libertarian deputy found herself at the center of a strong political controversy after participating in a streaming in which she joked about death flights. Relatives of victims of state terrorism asked Congress to evaluate their expulsion, considering that it was a mockery of crimes against humanity.
Last Saturday, Lilia Lemoine, national representative for La Libertad Avanza and regular informal spokesperson for the brothers Javier and Karina Milei, participated in the program “FDC”which is broadcast on Ánima Digital streaming. The series is hosted by lawyer Alejandro Sarubbi Benítez and usually addresses the political situation with a provocative and confrontational tone.
During the broadcast, the host began to focus his interventions on Peronism and link militants and leaders with different crimes. In that context, one of the panelists, Alfredo “Rino” Gammariello, took the floor and launched a phrase that sparked controversy. “The only thing that goes wrong for them is water. When they go to the marches they bathe them; if they are thrown out of planes, they don’t know how to swim and, if they throw themselves somewhere in the south, they also drown,” he said on air.
The reference directly alluded to different episodes of state violence: the repression of social protest, the death flights – the final phase of the extermination carried out by the last military dictatorship, in which the victims were previously drugged to immobilize them before being thrown from planes into the sea or rivers – and the death of Santiago Maldonado, who drowned while escaping from a Gendarmerie operation, while trying to cross a watercourse without knowing how to swim. While Gammariello spoke specifically about death flights, Lemoine was sitting next to him and reacted with a laugh, when another columnist added: “Kukas are not waterproof.”
Images and fragments of the program quickly circulated on social networks and generated widespread condemnation. Based on what happened, the Relatives and Companions of the 12 of the Holy Cross group presented a formal request to Congress to evaluate the expulsion of Lemoine from the Chamber of Deputies, considering that his reactions and the context of the program constituted a trivialization of State terrorism.
In the presentation, the complainants maintained that the deputy’s statements and gestures exceed the framework of political opinion and stressed that, due to her status as a public official, Lemoine has an institutional responsibility that makes her participation in this type of expression especially sensitive.
The episode revived the debate about the limits of legislators’ freedom of expression in streaming spaces and social networks, and once again put tension on the link between political provocation, historical memory and public responsibility.
