MAYARA PAIXÃO
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA (FOLHAPRESS) – Javier Milei’s team says in the corridors of the Casa Rosada that it is studying the drafting of projects to possibly remove the understanding of femicide from the Penal Code, leave the Paris Agreement and the WHO (World Health Organization) .
A frequent comment that circulates in Washington, Milei’s guiding star after Donald Trump’s return, also applies to Argentina today: it is said that we need to wait to understand what the gap is between the government’s rhetoric and the reality of your actions.
In any case, the measures are studied with priority by one of the ends of the so-called “iron triangle” that today heads the Casa Rosada: Milei himself; his sister Karina, who is also general secretary of the Presidency; and Santiago Caputo, his advisor and former political consultant who has no official position but has more power than many ministers.
Caputo would be leading this agenda. To the local press, under reservation, members of the Milei administration say they know that the actions will have broad resistance in Congress, where the government is a minority, but that they still want to put them on the table. It is the cultural war, increasingly a priority on the Argentine government’s agenda, which in recent months has celebrated its good economic indicators and seen itself strengthened.
The strategy appears to have been to use Milei’s strong speech at the World Economic Forum, in Davos (Switzerland), as an omen. The self-declared libertarian fired against the gender equality and environmental agendas and against international organizations.
At a certain point in his speech, he said: “We have reached the point of normalizing that, in many supposedly civilized countries, if a person kills a woman it is called feminicide, and this generates a more serious penalty than if he kills a man, just for the sex of the victim, thus legalizing that a woman’s life is worth more than a man’s.”
The crime of feminicide was incorporated into the Argentine Penal Code in 2012, although not literally. This crime was considered an aggravating factor of homicide when it was established that when a man kills a woman motivated by gender-based violence, judges must give him a life sentence. Official data shows that almost 2,500 women were victims of this crime in ten years, from 2014 to 2023.
This Friday (24) the Minister of Justice himself, Mariano Cúneo Libarona, said in his account on X that the legal figure of femicide will be eliminated. “For years they used women to fill their pockets and harm men,” he wrote.
Still in the area of gender, the government is considering ending quotas for trans people in the public service and making it mandatory for employees to undergo training on gender equality. The local press says that attempts to end same-sex marriage and the right to abortion would be left out of the package.
This did not stop Milei from criticizing the right to terminate a pregnancy in Davos. He called the right to abortion “a bloodthirsty agenda, designed based on Malthusian ideas [do economista Thomas Malthus (1766-1834)] that overpopulation will destroy the Earth and, therefore, we must implement a population control mechanism”.
Abortion is legal in Argentina for women up to the 14th week of pregnancy and, in other cases, such as sexual violence. This turned the country into a refuge for women from other nations, such as Brazilian women, with more restrictive rights.
When it comes to the WHO and the Paris Agreement, Milei would be following in the footsteps of Trump, who made these some of his first announcements after being sworn in for this second term.
At least in the opinion he expresses publicly, Milei does not believe that there is global warming accelerated by man’s actions, even if science proves the opposite. The economist, before becoming president, already said that this would be an “invention of socialism”.
In Davos, he said that there is a “sinister radical ecologism”. “Conserving our planet for future generations is common sense, no one wants to live on a landfill.” “But we have moved to a fanatical environmentalism in which human beings are the cancer that must be eliminated, and economic development is a crime against nature.”
Again, there are doubts about the distance between rhetoric and practice. Leaving the agreement could cause problems for Argentina.
1) Last year the country began its formal process of joining the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), for which the environmental agenda is important;
2) The free trade agreement between Mercosur and the European Union, which reached its final text last December, also has a highly relevant point on the climate agenda for Europeans.
