Argentina’s ‘Madman’: Inside the world of Javier Milei
Otacon Party, a regular event for anime and manga fans held at the Galicia Centre in Buenos Aires, has never been known for being overtly political. Attendees buy comic books and Pikachu plushies, and sing karaoke, often dressed in colourful costumes.
But at the February 2019 event, one cosplayer stood out among the rest.
“I am General Ancap,” declared the masked figure in a black-and-yellow superhero outfit, wielding a giant sceptre.
“My mission is to kick the asses of the Keynesian and collectivist sons-of-bitches who want to screw up our lives.”
While most superheroes are content enough fighting mutants or evil geniuses with doomsday devices, General Ancap (short for anarcho-capitalism) – or to use his true identity, the radical economist Javier Milei – considered the government itself a criminal enterprise.
Four years later, General Ancap became the president of Argentina.
Milei tends to be theatrical, and his public appearance – signature lambchop sideburns and wild hair – is no less iconic than that of his superhero alter-ego. The larger-than-life pundit-turned-president has a reputation for being eccentric, from swinging a chainsaw around at rallies to telepathically talking to his deceased dogs.
“All of us who know him know that he is not a balanced person,” Mariano Fernández, an economist at the University of CEMA (UCEMA) in Buenos Aires, told Al Jazeera. Fernández knew the president from their time together in academia in 2005 until Milei entered politics around 2020.
“His relationship with power, his exercise of power, his vehemence and his mood swings are what represent what the government of Milei is,” he said. “Essentially, it is an autocratic, anarchic and paranoid government.”
Elected on a pledge to revive the South American nation’s crisis-stricken economy through “shock therapy” – a controversial strategy involving deregulating businesses and drastically slashing government funding – Milei’s agenda has had mixed results.
Corruption scandals have also dogged his administration. Last year, Milei’s sister, Karina, his closest confidant, was implicated in a kickback scheme involving foreign pharmaceutical firms.
So, what goes on in the mind of the world leader, nicknamed “El Loco” – the “Madman”?
Javier Gerardo Milei was born on October 2, 1970, in Buenos Aires. His father, Norberto, was a taxi driver and, eventually, the owner of a transport company. Norberto was also abusive, often beating little Javier, calling him “trash” and telling him he would die of hunger.
“He was attacked and humiliated by his father; he had a really, really difficult life, and the Milei we see now is obviously a consequence of that,” Juan Luis González, author of "El Loco," a biography of the Argentinian leader, told Al Jazeera.
Only Karina tried to protect him, while Milei’s mother, Alicia, a housewife, was not violent but enabled the abuse by siding with her husband. Once, Karina witnessed Norberto beating her brother so severely that she suffered a panic attack.
“Your sister is like this because of you,” Alicia had told her son. “If she dies, it’s your fault.”
While he would later distance himself from his parents, even refusing to speak with them, Karina remained one of his closest confidants.
At this time, from 1976 until 1983, Argentina was under military rule, following a coup d’etat set on exterminating so-called "terrorists". Death squads murdered up to 30,000 suspected communist sympathisers during the Dirty War, and many more were tortured. Military rule ended shortly after Britain’s victory in the 1982 Falklands War – fought over contested islands 500km (300 miles) east of Argentina in the South Atlantic – and democracy returned with elections the following year.
As a teenager, Milei sang in a Rolling Stones tribute band and had a brief spell as a semi-professional footballer, playing goalie for the Chacarita Juniors, where he was nicknamed “El Loco” for his fiery temperament.
“He wasn’t afraid of anything,” a teammate recalled to the newspaper La Nacion.
“We trained on fields that were really rough. Rain or shine, we practised anyway. Nothing mattered. And he would do things that made us wonder… why does he do them?”
But young Milei’s interests soon pivoted to economics; he enrolled in university and earned two Master’s degrees. While in graduate school in the 1990s, Milei came across the work of early 20th-century British economist John Maynard Keynes.
Observing how unrestrained capitalism had led to the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes argued that governments should intervene to create jobs, offset inflation through taxes, and stimulate the economy during recessions with reduced interest rates. Keynesian ideas, notably, were behind the strong welfare states that emerged in Europe after World War II.
Milei was not a fan of Keynes. The Argentinian was much more attracted to libertarian economists, especially Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Hayek argued against state intervention, believing it clashed with personal freedom and private property, while Friedman’s star pupils, the so-called "Chicago Boys", advised Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Their ideology, known as neoliberalism, was the inspiration for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Milei once described the United Kingdom's first female prime minister as “one of the great leaders of humanity".
That reverence is not just rhetorical; it reflects Milei’s deep ideological conviction about the market’s role.
“This is precisely what distinguishes Milei from conventional liberalism,” political scientist Juan Bautista Lucca of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) told Al Jazeera.
“For him, the market is not simply efficient; it’s just. This is a moral question.”
Another inspiration was Murray Rothbard, the father of anarcho-capitalism.
Rothbard rejected any form of state authority, believing that taxes and welfare should be abolished. Instead, society should be organised purely around private contracts.
“There would be no monopoly of violence, no state taking the law in its own hands that decides all conflicts,” explained German economist Phillip Bagus, author of the book The Milei Era and a supporter of the president.
“Everything would be private. There would be private streets, private hospitals, schools, universities, healthcare, police. Everything would be based on voluntary cooperation.”
In a 2024 interview with The Economist, Milei revealed that it was reading Rothbard’s books in 2013 that converted him to anarcho-capitalism. However, Milei recognises the difficulties of putting these ideas into practice and considers himself a minarchist: one who slims government duties to purely provide security (law enforcement and defence).
“He is a great communicator of ideas, but his theoretical knowledge is quite weak, contradictory, and dogmatic,” opined Fernández, who first met Milei in 2005 after reviewing and offering feedback on one of his academic papers.
In 2016, Milei made his first television appearance at age 45 on the late-night talk show Loose Animals, where he was asked about Keynes. Milei flew into a rage, ripping into not only socialists but the then-conservative government of Mauricio Macri. From then on, Milei became a regular fixture on Argentinian television, railing against the inefficiencies of government and denouncing what he described as the corrupt ruling “caste” of politicians, journalists, trade unionists and academics.
“The state is the paedophile in the kindergarten, with the children chained up and slathered in Vaseline,” he said on a 2018 television show, equating the state to a predator.
Many of Milei’s early televised appearances were on the channels A24 and América TV, owned by billionaire airport magnate Eduardo Eurnekian. Milei worked for Eurnekian from 2008 until 2021, ultimately becoming the chief economist at the tycoon’s Corporac
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