Who is Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, the “dialoguista” candidate of Argentina?

( Spanish) — “I am Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, a resident of the City of Buenos Aires and passionate about my country.” This is how the current head of government of the capital of Argentina presents himself in his official biography, who after two terms seeks to be president of the country in the midst of a complicated internal competition of the main opposition coalition, Together for Change, led by former President Mauricio Macri.

The relationship with the former president was close, at least since 2002, “when we decided to actively participate in politics at the hands of Mauricio Macri, with whom we founded the Commitment to Change party in 2003, which was later renamed the Republican Proposal (PRO) in 2005”, maintains the now pre-candidate.

Since then, he has been a central figure in Macri’s party: “That same year I was campaign manager for the PRO, when with the list of deputies from the City of Buenos Aires, we won the elections.” He also held that role in 2007 and 2011, when Macri was elected head of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires.

During those two periods, Rodríguez Larreta was the head of the City’s Cabinet of Ministers and then, when Macri won the presidency in 2015, he succeeded him at the head of the City. In 2019, the then president would not be re-elected, but Rodríguez Larreta, as head of government, obtained 55.9% of the votes. His biography highlights that he was the first to reach that position “elected in the first round in the history of the City.”

Today the relationship between the two has cooled. Macri supports another candidate within his party, former minister Patricia Bullrich, but he has also been open to a rapprochement with the right-wing libertarian candidate Javier Milei, who is not a member of that space. In addition, he has criticized various decisions and electoral strategies of Rodríguez Larreta in recent months.

The main criticism of Rodríguez Larreta comes from the hardest wing of his party, which includes Bullrich and his allies. They consider him too “dialogue-like”, especially with Peronism. During the pandemic, it was common to see him at press conferences with President Alberto Fernández and the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof, announcing common strategies. However, that cordiality was broken in September 2020 when the president decided to deprive the city of federal co-participation funds, a tax collection distribution system. Rodríguez Larreta appealed to the Supreme Court, which ended up agreeing with the Capital. Now, in the middle of the campaign, Rodríguez Larreta, perhaps to get in tune with his internal competitors, has raised the tone of his criticism of the government.

Larreta, a life with everyone

“I was born on October 29, 1965, I am the son of Horacio and Cristina, and the father of three beautiful daughters: Manuela, Paloma and Serena,” the candidate describes in his biography, where he also states that he is an economist from the University of Buenos Aires and He earned an MBA from Harvard University.

Upon his return, in 1993, he founded the Sophia Group, “an NGO dedicated to training young people with a political vocation,” according to his biography. Also that year, she began her career in public service at the Investment Undersecretary of the National Ministry of Economy, headed by Domingo Cavallo, during the first presidency of Carlos Menem.

Two years later, already in Menem’s second presidency, he was appointed general manager of the National Social Security Administration (Anses), an organization that manages one of the main state budgets. In 1998 he moved to the Ministry of Social Development as Undersecretary for Social Policies, under the leadership of the legendary singer-songwriter and businessman Ramón “Palito” Ortega, with whom he would work for his campaign as vice-presidential candidate of Peronist Eduardo Duhalde in 1999.

The following year, under the presidency of the radical Fernando De la Rúa, he would be named controller of the social work for retirees, PAMI, another state organization with a million-dollar budget that had been involved in numerous corruption complaints during the 1990s.

On July 29, 2000, Dr. René Favaloro, the creator of coronary bypass surgery, shot himself in the heart after writing a letter in which he confessed that his medical foundation was in a “desperate” situation due to the debts of various organizations. .

“PAMI has an old debt with us, (I think since 1994 or 1995) of 1,900,000 pesos (at that time, one peso was equal to one dollar); We would have collected it in 48 hours if we had accepted the returns that were requested of us (of course not from me directly) ”, wrote Favaloro.

“Please, let’s not hand over power to those who took 13% from retirees or those who managed PAMI when Favaloro committed suicide,” President Alberto Fernández launched a few days ago in reference to Bullrich, when he was Minister of Labor during the government of Fernando De la Rúa, and to Larreta, at that time PAMI controller, but who was never mentioned by Favaloro in his letter.

“The President went to the car… (…) That association is a scoundrel and was invented by Kirchnerism several years after I had left PAMI. Favaloro is a hero. There are limits, you cannot do anything in politics,” responded, notably angry, the presidential candidate

From PAMI he went on to work in the province of Buenos Aires, under Peronist governor Carlos Ruckauf, as president of the Social Welfare Institute in 2001 and then again at the national level as general director of the General Tax Directorate (DGI).

Rodríguez Larreta has always kept a low profile, although for a few months he has shown himself more regularly with his new girlfriend.

The mother of his daughters, Bárbara Diez, to whom he was married for more than 20 years, has been lapidary with him: “If a man lies to his wife, he will also lie to me. If he is able to break the nuptial oath, he will be able to break his oath to public service ”, he published his Instagram account in September 2022, posting that he deleted after a few hours but that they replied the country’s main media. Rodríguez Larreta never commented or responded to that fleeting tweet.

But today the main criticism comes from his opponents in the internal party, especially from Macri and Bullrich, who question his attempts to add new partners to the coalition and not be part of what they consider “the real change.” Although at the same time, those also receive even harsher criticism for their flirtations with Milei, in particular from the wing of the coalition that expresses the Radical Civic Union.