MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentina: Breakup among Libertarian lawmakers imminent

Arrieta said Martín Menem called her “a little whore”

Libertarian Congresswoman Lourdes Arrieta, who gained notoriety for claiming she did not know who the people she visited with a group of fellow lawmakers at the Ezeiza penitentiary because she had been born in 1993, keeps undermining whichever unity President Javier Milei's Parliamentarians might have left by denouncing House Speaker Martín Menem for allegedly labeling the female deputies of his bloc as ”whores.

Arrieta and other legislators visited well-known military or paramilitary people serving lengthy prison terms for crimes against humanity committed during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, and who are said to have financed Vice President Victoria Villarruel's political campaigns in the hope that they would be granted a presidential pardon or their sentences commuted to house arrest given their ages.

In this scenario, Arrieta and fellow Libertarian Congresswomen Rocío Bonacci and Marcela Pagano might be expelled from the party's bloc anytime soon, it was reported in Buenos Aires.

Arrieta insisted in a radio interview that bloc leader Gabriel Bornoroni was pulling the rug beneath them for denouncing that those who reached power claiming to represent change were nowhere near there. “We are doing the darkest of politics. Those are the people who are legislating in the name of freedom?” she wondered after leaking to the press the alleged bill the ruling party was reportedly drafting to grant the convicted genocidal officers a house arrest.

The Congresswoman from Mendoza also claimed that Martín Menem -a nephew of former President Carlos Saúl Menem (1989-1999) and son of former Senate Provisional Speaker Eduardo Menem- called her a “little whore” in the middle of a recent scandal in Congress. Arrieta then insisted she had an attack in light of “so much hypocrisy” and said Menem told her that there was “no place here for the lukewarm.”

“When a woman tells you, shouting, that you have no balls, it is because you have lost all authority,” Arrieta argued. The document she leaked mentioned some sort of formulation whereby to apply a statute of limitations to the group of convicts from the National Reorganization Process of General Jorge Videla and his successors. Arrieta claimed these issues were not a part of President Milei's agenda and “have nothing to do with the ideals of freedom.”