Soccer is a springboard for power in Argentina.
But the need to obtain good sporting results makes it slippery ground.
Hugo Moyano, the most powerful trade unionist since the return of the South American country to democracy, skated in it.
A fan of soccer and boxing since he was a child, Moyano founded the Camioneros club in 2008 and in 2014 became president of Independiente, one of the five big ones in Argentina, where he stayed for eight years.
He approached two of his sons, Pablo and Facundo Moyano, to the business and pulled the strings so that who was then his son-in-law, Claudio Chiqui
Tapia
, became president of the Argentine Football Association (AFA).
Fighting today with Tapia, Moyano has been associated with the serious crisis that Independiente is going through these days.
At 79 years old, the veteran trucker leader remains silent, withdrew once again into unionism and with his eyes set on the presidential elections in October.
Moyano was denounced 15 days ago for alleged fraudulent administration and money laundering at Independiente by his successor as club president, journalist Fabián Doman.
This week, just six months after taking office, Doman unexpectedly resigned from him.
In public statements, he pointed out that the complaint against Moyano made the climate in the club rarer and the anonymous threats received since then were the trigger for him to step aside and leave the Avellaneda club with a million-dollar debt and on the verge of relegation.
Even without citing him, the threats denounced by Doman enlarge the black legend of Moyano.
Opposition references have described him as a "mafioso", "violent", "extortionist" and "
chorro
" [thief], among other insults, as a result of blockades of factories whose owners did not submit to union demands or calls for strikes and road cuts.
Moyano: you are a violent and gangster.
Stop destroying and leave Argentina alone.
pic.twitter.com/k7HgaO0aDH
— Patricia Bullrich (@PatoBullrich) August 2, 2022
Averse to interviews, Moyano has avoided discussing Doman's resignation.
He has not referred to the complaint that he filed before the Justice either, one more in a long list from which he has always emerged gracefully up to now.
His activity in these weeks is about to regain prominence on the public scene with a great union act on May 1 and numerous meetings with senior union officials and political supporters.
Moyano was born in 1944 in La Plata, 60 kilometers south of Buenos Aires, but spent much of his childhood in Mar del Plata, Argentina's most popular coastal city.
The son of a trucker and firefighter and a factory worker, he was the only son of four siblings.
He had his first job at the age of 11: he labeled sausages in a factory.
Later he was a delivery man for a butcher shop and at 17, through his father, he entered the moving company Verga Hermanos.
The dispute over having a work uniform was his first union action and a few months later he made his debut as a truck driver and union delegate.
It was an upward path that took him to the general secretariat of the Truckers' union, in 1987, and to control the largest labor union in Argentina, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), in 2004.
Truckers attend a rally to celebrate Trucker's Day wearing T-shirts with the face of union leader Hugo Moyano in Buenos Aires, in December 2009. Natacha Pisarenko (AP)
“That everything that goes on wheels belongs to Truckers”, was the motto of the American trade unionist Jimmy Hoffa that Moyano used as a guide for the expansion of his power.
Directly or through his children, today he controls garbage collection, gasoline distribution and even tolls.
The strength of its power has an economic origin: more than 90% of what Argentina produces is transported by road.
For more than three decades, the man capable of paralyzing this vital truck traffic is the same: Moyano.
Or the
Negro
, as friends and allies call him.
Mariano Martín, a journalist specializing in trade unionism and co-author of the biography
El hombre del camírón
, together with Emilia Delfino, says that “despite his age, his ailments and the fact that power does not deal with him in the same way it did 20 years, Moyano will continue to be a very important and unavoidable leader for the Government while he is in charge of the union on which the transport of 90% of Argentine GDP depends.
"As long as there is no substantial change, which nothing indicates will happen in the coming years, he is the man of reference for negotiating," says Mariano Martín.
A Peronist by birth, Moyano has not hesitated, however, to approach or stand up to successive governments in order to defend his interests.
The great harmony that he maintained with Néstor Kirchner and with his wife and successor, Cristina Kirchner, was reflected in important spaces won in the Executive Branch: the area of Transportation and that of Obras Sociales (union health system) were left in the hands of loyal people to Moyano.
Truckers' union leader Hugo Moyano and former Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner during a rally to celebrate Truckers' Day in Buenos Aires in December 2009. Natacha Pisarenko (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
business conglomerate
His fortune grew like never before in those years through a prosperous network of companies controlled by his third wife, Liliana Zulet, today in the crosshairs of justice.
The main one is called Iarai and it manages the clinics and geriatrics of the Camioneros social work, which has a million-dollar box.
But the construction company Aconra, the insurance company Caminos protegidos, the textile company Dixey SA and the security company Las Marías, among many others, are also part of the family emporium.
Journalistic investigations suggest that his assets are around ten million dollars and include among his most valuable assets an exclusive 10,000-meter estate in Parque Leloir, on the western outskirts of Buenos Aires.
Moyano was married three times and had seven children.
Pablo, the eldest son, is assistant secretary of Truck Drivers and co-head of the General Secretariat of Labor.
Paola, the second, was married to Claudio Chiqui Tapia, the current president of the AFA who brought the World Cup from Qatar.
Karina, a social psychologist, is in charge of the Truck Drivers Gender area.
Emiliano died in 2011, at the age of 36.
Facundo, at the head of the toll union, was a deputy for the Frente de Todos (in the Government) until 2021. Hugo Antonio, a lawyer, is the legal adviser to a dozen CGT unions.
Jerónimo, the last one, is the only child in common with Zulet, his current partner.
The relationship with the Casa Rosada became tense as of 2011, when Fernández de Kirchner was re-elected with 54% of the vote.
“Cristina understood that with that flow of votes she did not have to distribute power and Moyano is not a person who meekly accepts crumbs.
When Cristina left, he acted in a mirror”, says Martín.
Moyano called general strikes in 2014 and 2015 and approached Mauricio Macri during the electoral campaign with which the former mayor of Buenos Aires became president.
But the first short circuits were not long in appearing and the trade unionist became one of his staunchest opponents in the streets.
Months ago, when it seemed that Macri was going to seek revenge against Alberto Fernández, Moyano called him "disordered" and "mindless" and warned his team that, if the opposition coalition Juntos por el Cambio (Juntos por el Cambio) wins, they would seek to put them in prisoners.
Unlike his son Pablo, aligned with Kirchnerism, the patriarch of the family has come closer in recent weeks to the most orthodox sectors of Peronism.
Hugo Moyano delivers a speech during a Labor Day demonstration in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in April 2011. Natacha Pisarenko (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Multiple complaints
In the nineties, Justice investigated Moyano for illegal drug possession after finding at least 300 grams of cocaine in his office.
He claimed that they had planted it and could never be charged.
A decade later, he faced another trial for alleged illicit enrichment and diversion of union funds to family businesses that also failed.
Last week, the court filed another case that had been opened against him in 2011 for alleged money laundering of more than a million dollars and the apparent creation of a shell company.
There is no news about the complaint for alleged fraudulent administration and money laundering as president of Independiente.
The
Red
fans have joined the list of enemies harvested by Moyano throughout his six decades of union activity.
They accuse him of having stolen a fortune and aggravating the club's financial crisis to the point of leaving it on the verge of bankruptcy.
Moyano ignores the accusations and after years of going it alone seeks to build bridges with union leaders.
It is a bet against time: to strengthen as much as possible in the face of the opposition victory that the polls predict in the presidential elections next October.
Hugo Moyano raises his hand during an extraordinary assembly of the Argentine Football Association on July 11, 2016 in Ezeiza, Argentina.Amilcar Orfali (LatinContent via Getty Images)
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