A fake government also in Argentina: lie, lie… that something remains

Aram Aharonian

In post-truth times, fake news, mendacious stories and deliberately expressed lies are part of everyday world politics and have become a substantial feature of today’s hegemonic culture, which attaches little importance to truth in the face of convincing and reaffirming narratives of one’s own subjectivities and interests.
Javier Milei’s ultra-right-wing government is neither interested in nor concerned with attending to and reflecting on arguments based on evidence. It prefers the uncritical brevity of the stories that can be transmitted on digital networks and continues to consolidate the possibility of establishing real policies with false information.

There are concepts that become fashionable and are used until they become part of common sense. Words that for a long time and gradually become part of everyday speech and media narratives, and even of academic analysis with reflective aspirations, until they are replaced by others that at that moment describe or explain part of another more urgent reality.

President Javier Milei’s speech on the day of his inauguration was full of false information, with an interpretation of Argentina’s historical past that, far from empirical evidence, placed it as a supposed world power. False information is not innocent but deliberate and those who innocently or not share it, consolidate its legitimization -the so-called confirmation bias- given the hegemonic incidence of digital social networks in the construction of common sense.

“The story” that replaces real journalism creates a narrative of the facts to the consumer’s taste. With the critical function of the press eliminated, reality can be deformed, problems can be exaggerated, non-existent paradises can be promised or any character that is not to their liking can be sent to the wall. The truth does not matter when there is no one to tell it so that someone can listen to it. That is what today they call post-truth.

The technological revolution has also brought a proliferation of ideological niches, of sectarianism that acts as a breeding ground for hatred, xenophobia and racism. It is common that users of social networks do not use them to access the world of knowledge, but to interact among the small circle of those who are like me, and thus prejudices are fed back and ascend to the category of unquestionable doctrine. Or they are manipulated by unscrupulous rulers (Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Milei).

Fake content spreads faster and reaches further on digital platforms than true facts, not because of news broadcasting programs but because of the direct action of people through their digital interaction.

Assault on a girl

The chief of the Argentine Federal Police (PFA), Luis Alejandro Rollé, allowed the dissemination of a fake video of the attack on a 10-year-old girl with pepper spray with the intention of covering up the brutal police action and incriminating alleged “leftist groups” with false evidence.

With a close relationship with the Minister of Security Patricia Bullrich, Rolle was the one who sent to the media a video whose images had been adulterated, with which he wanted to demonstrate that those who threw the pepper spray against a 10 year old girl in the march for the retirement mobility in the Congress were not the security forces.

The Ministry of Security released a video in which a woman allegedly threw a powder against the police. These images were accompanied by posts from X indicating that it was red pepper and that the girl was injured. After criticizing the reasons why a girl should be in a protest, the para-official media outlets reinforced the idea by replicating the video ad nauseam. Patricia Bullrich as well as President Javier Milei echoed the video fake.

“That 10-year-old girl who ended up with red eyes because she had received pepper spray, people from the left and Kirchnerism said that the police threw it on her. It was not the police. A civilian, dressed in orange, threw pepper gas at this little girl”, affirmed the ‘journalist’ Jonathan Viale on TN channel , while Nicolás Wiñazki mentioned the presence of ‘infiltrators in reverse’ .

Journalist Eduardo Feimann told Bullrich, who claimed that the police had not sprayed the minor with gas, that it was Rolle who sent the fake video to the production of his program. In a true video it is clearly seen that the protagonists of the aggression were agents of the Federal Police, in the middle of a repressive operation.

On Thursday, the operation of the government was exposed when the journalist of the channel Todo Noticias (TB), Manuel Jove, published the video in which it can be seen how a praetorian guard of the police advances and gasses different demonstrators and the girl, who was sitting on the asphalt avoiding the onslaught. “Deliberately false information on the part of a public body is very serious,” said the communicator.

Javier Milei published on his official Instagram account a list of alleged false news about his person. The plate bears the signature and logo of “Argentina Presidencia”. However, this is false since it is not an official publication made by the Executive Branch of the Nation, points out the portal Chequeando

Fake Milei

But the first “fake news” it lists do correspond to proposals or ideas that the presidential candidate of La Libertad Avanza expressed publicly during the campaign. He posted an image on his official Instagram account under the following caption: “Fake News about Milei”. There, it lists a series of statements that, he insinuates, were not said by him and were installed as alleged fake news.

The plaque has the slogan “Taking care of information is taking care of democracy” and bears the signature and logo of “Argentina Presidencia”. However, this is false since it does not correspond to a content of the national Executive Power and, contrary to what the image indicates, there were statements that were actually made by Milei himself during the electoral campaign.

In the first point of the publication, the sale of organs appears as an alleged misinformation about Milei. However, this is false. In May 2023, in the program Somos Buenos of TN channel, when he was asked if he was in favor of the sale of organs, he answered: “There is something that is not working well. So what one is proposing is (that) we review the mechanism. Let’s look for a market mechanism to solve these problems.”

The second point that, according to Milei, is a “fake news” is the proposal for the sale of children. However, in June 2022, in an interview in Radio Con Vos, he assured that “it is not a discussion to be held today in Argentina” but he said that it could be a debate to be held in the future in the country.

The next point makes that the free carrying of weapons is fake news about his proposals, although in May 2022, in the program “Verdad Consecuencia” of TN, Milei said: “I am in favor of the free carrying of weapons” and added: “When you prohibit the use of weapons, criminals, no matter how much they prohibit it, use them anyway”.

In the electoral platform of La Libertad Avanza, it is stated that “On the possession of firearms we propose the deregulation of the legal market and protect their legitimate and responsible use by the citizens”.

The Spanish newspaper El País, pointed out on April 9 that Milei cited a false account to argue the fall in inflation. “The inflation rate is going to collapse, this I advanced,” he said (…) during an online interview in which he used as an example of the fall in prices the data from Jumbot, an alleged bot that reported the daily variations of the basic basket in one of the best known supermarkets in Argentina, Jumbo.”

“We went from [a price variation of] +5.22 to -4.52″, quoted Milei, who attributed the drop to the measures taken since he took office four months earlier. Then Economy Minister Luis Caputo used the same X source to report the price slowdown in April. However, the data were false. The account cited by both revealed that it was “a social experiment” aimed at “seeing the need that many have to show results that reality denies them”.

Ryszard Kapuściński used to say that when it was discovered that information was a business, truth ceased to be important. False information appears today -also in Argentina- as a state policy. Deliberate lies and fallacious stories are an indissoluble part of today’s hegemonic discourse, of the political discourse that legitimizes State policies.

*Author of Vernos con nuestros propios ojos, El asesinato de la verdad, La internacional del Terror Mediático, El asesinato de la democracia, El progresismo en su laberinto, among other books. Uruguayan journalist and communicologist. Master in Integration. Creator and founder of Telesur. Presides the Foundation for Latin American Integration (FILA) and directs the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis (CLAE).