Mexican scientist Salvador Galindo Uribarri did not know who Javier Milei, Argentina’s presidential candidate, was until a journalist contacted him in May last year. At that moment, the researcher realized that an article he had written with two colleagues, Mario Rodríguez Mesa and Jorge Luis Cervantes Cota, was published in Pandenomics, a book published by the far-right Argentine politician in 2020, six years later. the original text came out. Days later, Galindo Uribarri bought it to see with his own eyes. There were paragraphs and paragraphs in the introduction, in the historical passages to make reading more enjoyable, and in the equations he included to make his point. Everything had been copied from Milei. And at that moment he decided that he would not sit idly by and file a complaint through legal means. “The essential part of the above article appears reproduced in the book without prior and express authorization,” says the factual complaint to which EL PAÍS had access. “This alone allegedly constitutes a crime,” it continues.
The first page of the complaint by Mexican scientists against Javier Milei.Salvador Galindo SGU666
“At first the plagiarism caused us amusement, but then it was surprising: the surprising thing is that he didn’t even try to paraphrase the text,” said Galindo Uribarri, lead author of The Mathematics of Epidemics: Case of Mexico 2009 and 2009 others, to the Argentine magazine Noticias. The physicist, who received his doctorate from Oxford University, interviewed journalists Tomás Rodríguez and Juan Luis González on May 17, 2022. Five days later, the scientist filed a lawsuit, not only on behalf of the authors concerned, but also by the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, which published the original text in the journal Ciencia ergo sum in early 2014. “The problem is that no one has gone beyond complaining. The idea is to reach the ultimate consequences,” he explained. However, the 72-year-old scientist died of cancer on September 3, 2022, four months after the interview.
“He was insulted to the core,” recalls his widow Susana Bianconi from Argentina. “Milei’s opportunism was obvious, what he did reveals a lot about his insolence, his baseness, his contempt for other people and for his work,” he says. “I imagine he assigned a team of students to copy and paste.” [copiar y pegar] and that he didn’t even read it, even though he copied everything, even the anecdotes with which my husband entertained the reader,” she says.
In the complaint, both texts are compared in two columns: the original “on epidemic statistics” and Mileis “on the coronavirus pandemic”. “One morning in May 1665, George Vicars, a tailor from the small town of Eyam in England, received a package from London,” wrote Galindo Uribarri and his two co-authors in the introduction. Milei copied the same sentence and only added “while” to the beginning of the sentence, as recorded in the electronic version of Pandenomics.
On the left a page of the text by Salvador Galindo Uribarri, Mario Rodríguez Mesa and Jorge Luis Cervantes Cota. On the right a page from the book “Pandenomics”, signed by Milei.Salvador Galindo SGU666
“Humans are sociable, a condition that has made it inevitable that epidemics will occur again and again throughout our history,” emphasize the Mexican authors, quoting historian JN Hays. Milei barely changed the order of the sentence and added no clue.
The examples are so numerous that they take up almost 10 pages of the court document. The Copy Leaks portal, which compares the correspondence between two texts, shows that the beginning of the second chapter of Milei’s book is a 99.6% faithful copy of the introduction to the article “Ciencia ergo sum”. Other anti-plagiarism tools such as Duplichecker software detect that Milei’s lines actually come from Galindo Uribarri’s article.
Milei also collects entire paragraphs to explain mathematical models, uses equations with the same numbers, reports them as his own and uses the same design for the graphics, the complaint says. The Libertad Avanza politician even retained the use of the first person plural, as the scientists did, to detail the results: We observe, we underline, we wonder.
A comparison between a page containing the texts of the Mexican scientists and Milei, with the same graphic above.Salvador Galindo SGU666
However, there is a crucial difference between the two texts. Access for Mexicans is free. Milei’s book, published by Galerna Publishing, sells on Amazon for $18.95 and $9.99 for the electronic version. “Milei markets his book, the royalties from which do not flow to the coffers of the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico in a timely manner, possibly resulting in property damage,” the complaint states.
Accusations of plagiarism were a shadow that accompanied Milei throughout his career, from academic publications to his own autobiography to his campaign appearances. “Javier, I can’t cite your references well because in the last book you wrote you make three complaints of plagiarism,” ruling party Sergio Massa told him last weekend in the presidential debate, the last face-to-face meeting before more than 35 million Argentines will go to the polls this Sunday to elect their next president.
Last year, the newspaper Perfil published the most comprehensive journalistic investigation into Pandenomics plagiarism. The book also refers, among others, to the Spaniard Antonio Guirao, a physicist at the University of Murcia, and Gita Gopinath, an economist at the International Monetary Fund. “It’s not that he rehashed it, it was a complete copy and paste, copied paragraph after paragraph,” Guirao told El Confidencial this week. His case goes one step further: Milei not only stole his research results, he also distorted his conclusions and interpreted the results in a way that justified his own views.
Those around the politician have downplayed the plagiarism allegations or attributed them to the “nervousness” that he causes among his opponents. “I just remember an oral statement Milei made last year about how there were only a few pages, as if to say, ‘What are you complaining about?'” says Bianconi, the widow of one of the authors. Milei’s team did not comment on the occasion.
In late August, Ramiro Vasena, a candidate from the Liber.AR alliance, filed a plagiarism complaint in a Buenos Aires court against Milei for Pandenomics, whom he described as a “compulsive plagiarist,” according to Argentine media. However, Bianconi knew nothing about this case, nor did he know anything about the course of the legal dispute in Mexico.
“My husband’s email address and phone died with him. If they answered him, I will never know,” laments Bianconi. “I don’t feel like I have the right to do that for him,” he admits about the possibility of continuing the legal battle. This newspaper contacted the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, which did not comment before publishing this report.
“The justice system is very slow,” Galindo Uribarri told Noticias. A year after his death, his wife remembers him as the brilliant man who understood science as a great symphony; the popularizer who admired Einstein and was obsessed with understanding the universe, the life partner who left her a magnificent library and shared his love of nature with her. Bianconi still laughs when he remembers his books or is full of emotion when he talks about physics. A legacy that can neither be imitated nor stolen.
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