Karina Milei (Buenos Aires, 50 years old) has been Secretary General of the Argentine Presidency for a week. His position, created in 1948 by General Juan Domingo Perón and maintained during two dictatorships, countless governmental crises and temporary presidencies as the country emerged from them, is to assist President Javier Milei in shaping policies and drafting speeches and in protocol ceremonies. The essential role of the new presidential secretary will be the same as that of her entire life: to privately support, encourage and advise her older brother.
Karina was always there. As a child, when Javier Milei was guarding the goal of the soccer teams he played for, his sister watched him from the stands. As he received beatings and insults from his parents, he heard them from across the room. When she sang Rolling Stones songs in clubs where she danced and undressed, she was the one who received it from the audience. Karina was behind the scenes while her brother became famous on television channels railing against the Argentine political class Supporting actress in the play in which his brother, in the role of a psychologist, explained the hardships of the national economy and was the authoritative voice that epically recounted his childhood in the documentaries that prepared his foray into politics.
Karina Milei waited for her brother at every rally of her presidential campaign, she presented him as president-elect on the night of November 19, in which a country that had speculated for months about his influence finally heard and received his voice last Sunday as the new Argentine President came on stage. Along with the king of Spain, the president of Ukraine and some Latin American leaders, he was the last person to hug democratic Argentina's eighth elected president when he refused to speak in Congress and gave his first speech as president to a packed seat held Buenos Aires.
Javier and Karina Milei, on November 19, after learning of the former's presidential victory.AGUSTIN MARCARIAN (Portal)
Like her brother, Karina graduated from Cardenal Copello School, a private, Catholic institute in a middle-class suburb of Buenos Aires. Karina was three years younger than the president, studied public relations and completed a postgraduate course in event technology, while her brother studied economics. Karina was self-employed and, until a few months ago, registered with the Argentine tax authority as a provider of “personal services”. She devoted herself to tarot, selling tires and baking. His last venture was to bake custom cakes via Instagram, and now he will be the voice that weighs most on the conscience of the president elected by Argentines to put an end to an economic crisis that is causing inflation of 160% compared to the previous year and four years ago. One in ten Argentines lives in poverty.
His appointment was the first controversy
The appointment of Karina as secretary was the first controversy of the Milei government, which on Sunday, having just landed at the Casa Rosada, lifted by decree the president's ban on appointing direct relatives to public office. This Sunday, at a closed-door swearing-in ceremony, Milei burst into tears while her sister was being sworn in. Hours earlier, while hosting international leaders at the Casa Rosada, he joked with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “She’s the real boss,” the president told him, pointing to his sister.
Believers and critics say Karina was the brains of the campaign and her brother's guardian, the final person responsible for his clothes and his speeches, but also for his interviews, meetings and political pacts. Since August, Milei has been living in a luxury hotel in Buenos Aires that was her campaign headquarters. While the now former candidate waited safely in his suite for the election results, it was Karina who received the guests, checked for news at the press entrance table and stood at the lectern to wait for her brother's speeches.
Javier Milei, the son of a bus driver and a housewife, came into public life in a dispute with his parents. His sister took on the task of bringing them closer together. He called them “parents” and even went so far as to say that his father once beat him up for making a comment against the Falklands War, which shocked his sister so much that she had to be hospitalized in shock.
“The more they screwed him over, the more violence he got,” Karina said of her brother in one of the few interviews she gave. It was in one of the documentaries about Milei that were promoted during his election campaign this year. Another, the first, is about the genesis of everything the president thinks about his most trusted person.
Pandenomics was filmed in October 2020, when Milei launched his election campaign for MP for Buenos Aires. The documentary lasts half an hour and is a mix of an interview with the candidate and his travels through a noir Buenos Aires, in which Milei appears to be leading a secret revolution against an oppressive government. It cannot be missed. In the final minutes, current national MP Lilia Lemoine interrupts a rally dressed as a superhero to warn Milei that “the central bank appears to be doing its thing again.” The documentary ends at this moment as the current Argentine president hits one with a wooden hammer A replica of the bench is smashed and a dozen young people encourage him with shouts of “Destruction, destruction!” Karina, who acts as a bodyguard, watches him from the background decorated with angel wings.
A moment from the documentary “Pandenomics” directed by Santiago Oría. Santiago Oria
Milei has called his sister “The Messiah” or “Moses” and has even gone so far as to claim that he is just the “preacher” of his sister's heavenly mission. Karina, a more down-to-earth person, said she was the one who recommended that he ditch the jacket (sweater) and tie in favor of showing up with the leather jacket and his twirling hair and singing rock and roll songs that appealed to him radical rights were imposed as a new rebellion.
Karina has many affectionate nicknames for her brother, but most of all he is El Jefe. It is speculated that the Argentine president says it in the masculine because he is one of the crusaders of the conservative “culture war” who refuses to say “president” or “judge”, to use a comprehensive generic plural instead of the masculine, and because he believes that progressivism is an instrument of world domination. It has some of that, but it also has more: the head of Argentine politics for two decades was Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the first lady before she became president and the most influential politician of the century in Argentina. Karina Milei will not be First Lady, but she has also ushered in an era.