“Idiot”, “Imbécil”, “weak mental”: the Milei government resurrects insults to classify disability

Any person with some degree of intellectual disability in Argentina will now be considered “idiot”, “fool” or “mental weak.” Javier Milei’s government dusted terms already in disuse for the evaluation of those deserving of a disability pension. The decree with the new scale, drafted by the repudiation of the organizations that represent the collective, which considered it archaic and discriminatory and resolution violation of the United Nations Organization (UN) to which Argentina adheres.

It is usual for Milei Tilde to critics of “idiots”, “brawl” and “mogolics”, when at least creative “sons of a bitch” does not appeal. He usually says that things must be called by name, without euphemisms that it is necessary to remove from society. His verbiage has also penetrated the administration. At the end of last year, the Andis reviewed the regulation for the granting of pensions due to labor disability, which used criteria according to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, approved by the UN in 2008. In Argentina, that text has constitutional range, but Milei’s outrages considered it too lax and, therefore, a door to fraud. On January 14, a new scale that, in the psyche section changes the levels of mild, moderate, serious or deep intellectual disability by “idiot”, “imbécil”, “deep deep, moderate or slight mental mental.”

The claim of organizations had no effect, until the issue began to circulate on social networks and reached the press. This same Thursday, the one that had been “a mistake” to use “terms of psychiatric medicine to describe deep degrees of intellectual deficit that, at present, have been discontinued.” The resolution and its annex, said the agency, “will be modified following the current medical and regulatory standards.”

The annex of the decree, still in force, says: “The idiot did not cross the glysic stage, he does not read or write, he does not know the money, does not control sphincters, does not meet his basic needs, I could not subsist alone. The moron does not read or write, attend to their elementary needs, can perform rudimentary tasks. The weak mental weak only firm, has a simple vocabulary, does not handle money, can perform rudimentary tasks, ”says the annex of the decree. “In some cases, the diagnosis may not require the interconsultation of a specialist, as in Down syndrome, demential cadres in the state period, deep mental weaknesses, since the clinical parameters will be sovereign,” that is, in view of all, the text adds.

The new scale was copied word by word of ultraliberal Peronist to which Milei considers source of inspiration. Under the title Standards for the evaluation, qualification and quantification of the degree of disability of the workers, that text developed in 48 pages “a methodology of evaluation of psycho-physical deterioration, with uniform criteria, which allows to determine the degree of disability” of those who ask for a disability pension. The norm was modified years later to adapt it to the UN requirements.

Changes in the regulations passed at the time unnoticed. Until the X -called account spread the decree and quickly made it viral. The organizations that represent the collective, however, had already done their own. On February 3, the Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ) and six other NGOs “This regulation”, says the text, “implies a return to the medical model of disability, and therefore a serious setback for the rights of this group. The annex of the resolution assumes that there are people who can never work, and resort to terms such as ‘mental retardation’, ‘idiot’, ‘imbécil’ and ‘mental weak’. It is unnecessary to delve into the discriminatory, obsolete and pejorative character that these ways of naming. ”

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