Argentina’s Javier Milei Meets Jair Bolsonaro, Lending Key Support After Indictment

Argentine President Javier Milei met with former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Sunday at the sidelines of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Brazil.

Milei’s embrace of Bolsonaro offered support in the immediate aftermath of several indictments in which Bolsonaro stands accused of misappropriation of jewelry gifted by the government of Saudi Arabia during his presidency.

Milei traveled to Brazil over the weekend to participate in the CPAC Brazil conference, which took place in Balneário Camboriú, Santa Catarina, on Saturday and Sunday. Milei and Bolsonaro reportedly held private meetings on both  days prior to Milei’s speech to CPAC, in which he condemned socialism and publicly expressed support for Bolsonaro, describing the legal actions that the former Brazilian president faces as “judicial persecution.”

Milei’s recent trip to Brazil, the first since he took office in December, did not include a meeting with the nation’s radical leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has insisted that Milei needs to apologize to him after Milei called him an “angry communist” and “corrupt” on several occasions.

Videos published on social media show the moment Milei and Bolsonaro met upon his arrival at the hotel Mercure on Saturday evening, which served as venue for CPAC:

On Sunday, Bolsonaro published a video on social media that shows Milei greeting his son, lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, as well as the governor of São Paulo Tarcísio, Gomes de Freitas, and the governor of  Santa Catarina, Jorginho Mello, both key Bolsonaro allies:

Milei took the stage on CPAC on Sunday afternoon, delivering a speech centered around the “cultural and economic recipe” of socialism in Latin America and “how they are wrong and we are right.” Milei described socialism as an ideology that “goes directly against nature,” leading to slavery or death.

The Argentine president began by stating that in the past 20 years of socialism or leftist governments in Latin America, “you will surely find a series of common denominators that appear together and that constitute a true recipe for disaster, in the economic, social, political and cultural spheres, because there is a causal relationship between all these elements and it is not a mere coincidence.”

Milei continued by giving a thorough explanation of how socialist administrations fail through the overspending of public funds inherited from their predecessors’ economic bonanza, leading to increases in taxes that contract economic activity and destroy investment.

“As time goes by, they consume stocks to support a fictitious bonanza that only mortgages the future. The stock runs out until, at some point, they must resort to borrowing,” Milei said. “They never solve the underlying problem, which is the vicious circle of expanding public spending and the consequent fiscal deficit.”

“When they can no longer resort to taxes or borrowing, they resort to the worst of all evils, which is the issuance of money, thus destroying the value of their currencies and condemning the entire population to poverty,” he continued. “Along the way, they put regulation upon regulation in front of each problem that appears in order not to solve the underlying problem.” 

Milei described Argentina — which was ruled by socialists for 16 out of the past 20 years — as an “intermediate case” of socialism when compared to the authoritarian regimes of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

“As much as they tried, they never managed to take the socialist program to its ultimate consequences” in Argentina because they “were never able to fully subjugate society,” Milei said, “since they found a limit in a rebellious people who watch over their own freedom, who protect their property tooth and nail from the confiscating claws of politicians and who resist being dominated.”

“In the long run, socialism is unsustainable and necessarily fails, and governments that resist on that path either end up being rejected by society, or end up violating freedom and playing with the lives of their citizens to remain in power,” Milei concluded.

 “Look at the judicial persecution suffered by our friend Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil,” he continued.

The Argentine president urged that it is essential to “recover the concept of justice that socialism claims as its own,” asserting that “in the name of justice they have taken from some to give to others, who are precisely their children or their friends.”

“Look at how [Venezuelan dictator Nicolás] Maduro’s family or the children of leaders of your own country [Brazil] live,” Milei said. “They are all multi-millionaires and live as if they had invented Google.”

Milei addressed those “less optimistic” who believe that the battle against socialism “is lost, that we cannot face the power structures that have taken over our countries,” stating that he arrived to the presidency “without money, without a political party and without the support of the traditional media, but with his fists full of truths and with the unalterable conviction that life without freedom is not worth living.”

“Believe me, it can be done,” Milei said.

Milei concluded his speech by urging his listeners: “Trust in yourselves, become masters of your destiny, put up a fight in every corner where it is necessary and have faith that if you do it with conviction, you will achieve your goal.” 

“Because as the book of The Maccabees says, ‘Victory in battle does not depend on the number of soldiers, but on the forces that come from Heaven. And this has just begun,” Milei said, before closing with his widely famous catchphrase, “Long live liberty, damn it!”

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Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.