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Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that President Javier Milei signed the Honor Book with ‘Viva La Libertad Carajo’ signature during inauguration.
At noon on January 12, 1977, soldiers burst into Alicia Partnoy’s home, tore her away from her 18-month-old daughter and threw her in the back of a truck.
For months, she endured torture in a concentration camp in the Argentinian city of Bahia Blanca, before finally fleeing to the United States as a refugee.
The inauguration guest list also included Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, Spain’s King Felipe VI, and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Milei has called Putin a dangerous leader and appears to be positioning Argentina as Ukraine’s biggest Latin American ally. Writing on X, Zelenskiy said: “This is a new beginning for Argentina and I wish President Milei and the entire Argentinian people to surprise the world with their successes.”
Prominent leftwing leaders, including the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, stayed away. The authoritarian presidents of Venezuela and Nicaragua, Nicolás Maduro and Daniel Ortega, were not invited.
He warned, however, that Argentina – where annual inflation is expected to hit 200% this year and 40% of citizens live in poverty – faced an “emergency” situation. “The challenge before us is titanic … I’d rather tell you an uncomfortable truth than a comfortable lie,” he said.
Milei’s speech had strong echoes of Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration speech in which the American tycoon vowed to end an age of “American carnage”, crime and poverty and return power to “the people”. “Argentina has become a bloodbath,” Milei said, vowing to fight the drug traffickers who had “hijacked” the streets of its biggest cities.
He had been formally sworn in as Argentina’s next leader moments before in the presence of far-right associates including Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro; Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, the leader of Chile’s Republican party, José Antonio Kast, and the leader of Spain’s Vox party, Santiago Abascal. “The right is rising not only in Europe but all around the world!” Orbán tweeted as he arrived in Argentina’s capital.
Today, far-right economist and politician Javier Milei takes office as Argentina’s new president. At his side will be running mate Victoria Villarruel, a controversial figure, in part, for her views on the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.
Critics accuse Villarruel, a lawyer and former member of the Chamber of Deputies, of dismissing, downplaying and defending the abuses that occurred under the dictatorship, which killed an estimated 30,000 people.
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