Juan Grabois fantasizes, at this time, about taking refuge in a monastery. He dreams of turning off his cell phone and isolating himself from everything for a few months. Reality, however, imposes another destiny on him. The leader of Patria Grande tours the television channels and corridors of Courts, dedicated to promoting the criminal complaint for the food withheld by Capital Humano. In dialogue with Page 12, the lawyer points out that in the coming days it could be proven that the Government tried to cover up the expiration of the stored products and that, in the long run, Minister Sandra Pettovello will be convicted. He describes Javier Milei’s management as “a poor man’s factory”, he sees the President as “dissociated from reality” and predicts that “this delirious stage” will end badly.
Looking ahead, Grabois anticipates that he will be a candidate for deputy next year. “I’m going to head my own list, so they don’t break my balls,” he says and says that he already talked about it with former president Cristina Kirchner. Regarding Sergio Massa, his internal rival in the 2023 PASO, he questions his low profile and characterizes him as a “professional speculator politician.” “When the Homeland is in danger, everything is allowed except not defending it,” he completes.
-How is the situation regarding the judicial case for the delivery of food and the specific situation in the dining rooms?
The complaint we made for breach of official duties, and other crimes such as abandonment of person, is advancing at a steady pace. Here there is a crime that has the effect of not correctly distributing food and the people who need that food as victims. Faced with this crime, one of the ways to stop it is to force the Government to distribute what it has and it will rot. By failing to comply with the precautionary measure, the judge decides to raid the warehouses and finds more inconsistencies: foods that were and were not on the lists or foods that were on the lists and were not. From my point of view, they attempted to cover up the expiration of a significant amount of food. They got rid of the evidence. Which would be serious and I think it will be possible to prove it in the coming days.
-How do you analyze the Government’s response to Judge Sebastián Casanello’s order?
The Government unilaterally decides to distribute, in the most ridiculous and stupid way possible, 400 thousand boxes of powdered milk that expire on July 7 through an NGO called Conin. They say publicly that it has 84 centers, then there are 62, but in the end there were 22. There is no factual possibility that it has the capacity to distribute reasonably. So what is happening? Who do you give the food to? To social movements. He tells them ‘come get the boxes of milk because we can’t deliver them.’ The Government thus demonstrates that it has no planning capacity for something as simple as food distribution. What there is going to be is a call for investigation, a prosecution and a conviction.
-Are they going to condemn Sandra Pettovello?
-I am sure that it will end in a sentence for breach of official duties. She still has a time margin to put an end to the effects of the crime quickly and she made a maneuver that she processes in the court of Dr. Ariel Lijo, a case that they themselves present, delimiting Pettovello’s responsibility to the official Pablo De la Torre. What are they based on to define Pettovello’s responsibility? In a statement made by a man named Federico Fernández. On the 15th floor of the Secretary of Labor, that is, not in a police station or a court, within the framework of a seizure that I have very confirmed, which was with armed people in the place, where the guy says ‘I confess spontaneously , freely and without any condition that all the mistakes were made by Pablo De la Torre, who kept dollars and that Pettovello knew nothing. That level of madness drives this group. This is the judicial plot.
-And the political-social plot, what is it?
-What is happening is that there is a doubling of the indigence rate. According to the latest report from the UCA, we are at 18 percent indigence. There are practically 8 and a half million people who do not eat. It is a very high rate. Since 2001/2002 nothing like this has been seen. The Government is a factory of poor people and does not take mitigation measures. They maintain that it is enough with the AUH and the Alimentar Card, which are policies of Cristina (Kirchner) and Alberto (Fernández). The situation is that there is a shortage of supplies in the dining rooms.
-Milei’s response is that people are not stupid and that they are going to do something to not die.
-Is right. People have been looking for them all their lives. What they call ghosts are angels that exist in the neighborhoods, who perform miracles with two onions and manage to cook despite shortages and stigmatization. But what he says is consistent with his philosophy, the philosophy of the right to starve to death. What does that imply? That if people did not want to go hungry, they would have to work 18 hours a day, prostitute themselves, sell organs, exercise their freedom to collect them. One feels that the Government is literally waiting to see people dead before reacting.
-In the face of this insensitivity, can there be a social outbreak?
-There is already an explosion. What happens is that it is an implosion, which is the worst of explosions. We are in a process of self-destruction as a society. If we manage not to self-destruct, at some point we will look at this historical moment and see it as a nightmare, a delusional stage of our country.
-The recurring question there is how we got to this delirious stage.
-I have a hypothesis. The mother of this situation is that dehumanization was already culturally permeating our society. It’s not that Milei brought it. And the father is the hypocrisy of those of us who proclaim social justice, but do not achieve it in political practice. The hypocrisy of the last government, for example, or the Macri government, which said ‘zero poverty’. There is a combination of dehumanization and loss of credibility.
-Is there corruption and abuse of power in social organizations?
-In the two books I wrote about social movements I described the mechanisms of abuse of power that occur in the underground of the Homeland. Not only in social movements, but in the informal economy. Where power exists, there is abuse of power. It occurs in the same proportion as in any other area of society, only it is more brutal because reality is more brutal.
Now, the fallacy of generalization is a fascist technique. If you applied the same to everything else, for example, you would have to dissolve the Police because the 5th Police Station in Diamante is a den of drug traffickers. But not. We cannot disband the police. Nor can we dissolve social organizations that are fulfilling a role that the market and the State do not fulfill. Abuse situations must be taken one by one and avoided. We must build more solid, better audited and more rational public policies to minimize those possibilities that are always latent in the political, business, media, etc. spheres.
-What happens to you when you hear Milei compare himself to the Terminator and say that he comes from an apocalyptic future to eliminate socialism?
-Milei is particularly dissociated, absolutely disconnected from reality. He lives in a bubble where his intransigence is reinforced. This is not going to end well. He presides over the country with such an absolute uprooting from reality and with very minority but fervent audiences that applaud the stupid things he says. He is part of the power dynamic, which has happened to all or almost all people who have power, but elevated to the nth degree.
And then I think we are all dissociated at some point. You have to have some level of dissociation, because otherwise you will get sick. But the level today is too high. The problem of the lack of registration of what the priorities of reality are is the worst mistake of the national and popular movement. It is not understanding that their strength lies in the recognition and prioritization of the reality of the big-headed, the shirtless.
-Are you going to be a candidate next year?
-At this moment I am on a hiatus in my role as president of the party because I am practicing as a lawyer. But given that we won the appeal and we have a solid team, I’m going to answer you. Yes, I will be a candidate. I am going to head a list of deputies. Let’s go with our own list so they don’t break my balls. I don’t want to get into any thread, I don’t want to support anyone. We have a force in all the districts of the country that will present a list. Let’s go with ours. Because we also believe that political representation cannot be part of the partyocracy.
Political representation has to look more like society and less like orgas. We have a theory of political representation, a program called the Comprehensive Human Development Plan and a leadership that is autonomous from the rest of the Union for the Homeland quadrants. We are not going to move an inch from the popular coalition, where there are people we like more and we like less, but we are going to dispute an orientation within the coalition.
-That coalition has a leader, Cristina Kirchner. Did you talk about it with her?
-I talk constantly with Cristina and she knows perfectly what I think. She values me, she respects me and she loves me because I always tell her what I think. And if I have to argue with her, I argue with her. Sometimes she is right and sometimes she is not. For example, about her assessment of social movements. We also do not have agreement on how income transfers to people in poverty should be handled. She doesn’t like cooperatives very much because she sees them as a form of intermediation. We have a lot of differences, but we will never stop respecting, valuing and vindicating everything she did for the poorest.
-What do you think of Massa’s strategy of remaining silent, with very sporadic appearances?
-Massa is the archetype of the professional politician. What I want to convey to our militancy is that he is what one should not be: a professional politician. We must be popular political activists. What he is doing is like a submarine going underwater and raising the periscope. When he sees that he can shoot a rocket, he shoots it. The problem is that he is the submarine of a lost patrol, because the Argentine Republic is being bombed. When the Homeland is in danger, everything is allowed except not defending it and the Homeland is being sold, destroyed, raped. Everyone should be putting their bodies to the bullets. I don’t want to extrapolate my personality or the nature of our organizations to the rest of our political field, but it seems to me that there is a little lack of punch.
Massa represents the speculator politician, who knows how to speak, when to speak, what to say, how to say it. With that no reality was ever transformed. That can help you come to power, hopefully, but not to transform reality.
