All of Argentina knows that the president, Javier Milei, adores his “little four-legged children,” as he calls the dogs that live with him in the Quinta de Olivos, the residence of the heads of state on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. What no one is sure of is how many English Mastiffs he owns. In the few known images of his pets, Milei appears with four. He, on the other hand, assures that there are five and that is how they appear in the baton of command that he received when he took office in December. A couple of journalists have asked the presidential spokesperson, Manuel Adorni, about the number of dogs this week, but his answers have only managed to amplify a doubt that his detractors fuel to question the president’s mental health.
“I don’t understand how it changes you if there are four dogs, if there are five dogs or if there are 43 rabbits. “What’s the difference?” Adorni answered in his morning press conference on Monday. Under cross-examination, he tried to settle the debate with a confusing clarification: “If the president says there are five dogs, there are five dogs and it’s over.”
This Thursday, another journalist argued that it was necessary to repeat the question: “Whether there are four or five dogs is not a problem for the president but for all Argentines, because if the president has four dogs and sees five, we are talking about a person who “He sees something that does not match reality, that’s why I say that we are interested in the number of dogs.”
The spokesperson replied that it is “a lack of respect to define the president as a person who speaks with things that do not exist.” Adorni accused the journalist of “messing with his family” and pointed out that it is necessary to stop talking about this issue.
The questions echo a debate that has been in place in Argentine society since the electoral campaign. In his biography of the libertarian leader, Crazy, Juan Luis González says that his first dog, Conan, died in 2017. Milei, unable to assimilate his death, contacted a laboratory to clone him and began to talk to him through a medium. When Morning Express interviewed the then presidential candidate in July, he first stated it, but then left it up in the air:
—Is it true that you have a telepathic conversation with Conan?
— Yes, they also say that my dogs are my advisors and they are fabulous, because look at everything I achieved in terms of results.
—But then you talk to Conan?
—What I do inside my house is my problem.
At that time there were four months left until he was elected president. After the far-right victory at the polls, the media echoed the message published by the laboratory where he cloned the mastiffs, PerPETuate, in which they boasted that he had dedicated the victory “to Conan, to his deceased dog, and to the four clones created from the preserved cells.” Along with the message appeared a photograph of Milei with four dogs in 2018, another of Conan and a third in which three clones are seen. When you access the same page today, however, the number is corrected and “five clones” appear.
The confusion has continued ever since. In a recent interview with cnn in Spanish, the journalist asked him about his four dogs, named after famous libertarian economists: Murray, Milton, Robert and Lucas. “There are five,” Milei corrected him before telling him that the way he relaxes is to go see them every day in the kennels that he ordered to be built for them in the Olivos farm. The president gave details of the character of each of his five pets. “Conan looks very calm, but don’t provoke him,” he warned.
Was Milei referring to the Conan who died in 2017 or to a fifth clone of which there are no known photographic records?
The mystery has become a source of ridicule by Milei’s opponents. “Study to avoid asking a dead dog for advice”, read one of the banners raised in the massive mobilization in defense of public education on Tuesday. “Without mental health you see your dog dead,” said another. “Conan is dead,” they wrote on the walls of the streets through which the march took place. Some protesters pretended to give orders to an invisible dog, represented by a stick to which they had tied a collar to one end. Others pretended to have him kidnapped and they threw spray at a supposedly invisible dog.
Milei’s political rivals know that devotion to his pets is one of the weak points of a leader known for his outbursts and outbursts of anger. Some have even suggested that he may suffer from a psychological disorder, such as former president Alberto Fernández, who addressed him through the networks this Thursday: “You should know that my dog does not advise me (and he is alive), that the “forces of heaven” do not send me signals and that my actions and reactions are the result of reflection and not of psychological alterations.” The president, at least in public, does not respond to these provocations.
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