MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentina new cabinet minister, a political scientist from Peronist nomenclature

Abal Medina has worked with De la Rúa, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner

Argentina’s new cabinet chief and former Media Secretary of the Executive, Juan Manuel Abal Medina, 43, besides his own proven merits carries an illustrious name in the Peronist nomenclature.

His father Juan was the personal delegate of Argentine leader Juan Peron and chairman of his political movement in the seventies. He also organized the Operation Return for Peron in 1972 and was later couple of Nidia Garré at the time the youngest member of Congress and currently Security Minister of Cristina Fernandez.

His uncle Fernando was one of the founders of the Montoneros, the guerrilla branch of Peronism, killed in a shootout with the police in 1970.

Abal Medina is a political scientist, sociology researcher and professor. He graduated with top honours and gold medal from the University of Buenos Aires and did graduate studies in Georgetown University in Washington having as a tutor Guillermo O’Donnell considered a maximum authority in Argentine and South American political affairs. He also has a PhD in political science from FLACSO, Mexico.

Considered a workalcoholic and a technology communications addict, Abal Medina has a long political career with several Argentine governments beginning with the left-wing mayor of Buenos Aires, Aníbal Ibarra and later head of Public Administration National Institute under former President Fernando De la Rúa.

In 2005 sponsored by then President Nestor Kirchner’s cabinet chief Alberto Fernandez Abal Medina is named as head of the Public Performance Secretariat. Later he becomes advisor to the presidency of the Lower House and on request from the late president Kirchner Unasur Secretariat advisor, until his death. From then on, Cristina Fernandez names him head of Media Relations.

His naming was praised by all political parties with congressional representation and although respected given his academic background, he also has surprised on defending some of the most notorious characters of the Cristina Fernandez team.

He has openly supported Planning Minister Julio De Vido and Guillermo Moreno the Domestic Trade Secretary, known for his thug performances in fighting inflation.

“It is said that De Vido is corrupt and that Moreno carries a gun, I ask, ¿who has seen them? The problem is when institutions are weak regulation of markets need strong discussions. There is no brutal or obscure side to Kirchnerism: we all defend the same project, only from different angles”.

On double digit inflation: “People feel bad because of a 30% inflation that is nonexistent; price increases are an artificial creation from the media, amplified by an opposition incapable of doing a thing. I do my own shopping; I spend more or less the same as before, maybe a little more”.

Abal Medina was born in 1968 and brought up in the camp where he went to a rural school since his father was under asylum in the Mexican embassy in Buenos Aires following the 1976 coup. At the end of the Falkland Islands conflict in 1982 the whole family moved to Mexico. The family only returned to Buenos Aires in 1985.

Contrary to his father, uncle and many members of the current Argentine government Juan Abal Medina did not have an active militancy as a student, which he admits.

“What I can remember is that General Peron once gave me an Easter egg”, said Abal Medina in a recent interview. However he is intellectually very close to Cristina Fernandez and helped bridge relations between the president and Argentine academia and intellectuals.

Abal Medina defines himself as a “Progressive Peronist” and shares with Cristina Fernandez admiration for the Belgian sociologist Ernesto Laclau and his political scientist wife Chantal Mouffe as well as Argentine philosophers Federico Schuster and Jose Pablo Feinmann.