Before leaving Washington and beginning the return to Buenos Aires, with a stopover in Miami in between and with the Milei brothers as flight companions,
Patricia Bullrich
sent a message to her small table of PRO leaders.
"We must go out and support the Government
," was, in summary, the idea that she conveyed and that she will sign in the next few hours through
a document that will be signed by some leaders of the party that she still presides over
.
She still hasn't decided whether she will publish it on Monday, first thing in the morning, or this Sunday night, in the midst of media euphoria for the superclassic.
Bullrich will put the hook on a text that will openly describe the "blackmail" that, he understands, the governors are carrying out against Javier Milei.
And
he will point, without naming him, to Ignacio Torres
, the young Chubut president who on Friday afternoon came out with his guns against the Executive Branch for withholding $13.5 billion in co-participation from his province.
"If they do not comply with the Constitution and do not send resources to the people of Chubut, then Chubut will not deliver its oil and gas," was Torres' warning that altered the mood of the President and the entire Cabinet, including the Minister of Security. .
As
Clarín
reported , Bullrich spoke with Torres last week, before the governor decided to show his discomfort with the Government.
Both had a very good relationship
since before the elections that Torres ended up winning in July of last year, a result that Bullrich capitalized on by traveling to Trelew and hugging him, when there were just two weeks left for the presidential PASO in which he won over Horacio Rodríguez Larreta. .
"Nacho" was always very complimentary of the minister's management, and she returned kindness by highlighting him as a rising figure within the PRO.
But times changed.
Video
The Minister of Security reconstructed the conversation she had with the governor of Chubut prior to the threat to cut off the supply of oil and gas.
The comparison with Puigdemont and a very harsh statement
"Patricia thought it was a joke, she laughed when Nacho told her what he was going to do," said a source close to the minister about the reaction she had after Torres notified her of his next steps.
She sarcastically compared him to Carles Puigdemont
, the leader who in 2017 declared the independence of Catalonia from Spain, and reviewed a series of decisions by his government that are quite far from the management logic that, she claims, Torres proclaims.
"Before proposing this logic of rebellion,
I would have to shrink the State plant and freeze salaries like we did in the Government
," Bullrich told Torres to the PRO leaders whom he convinced to sign the document.
When the minister disagrees with someone's position, she starts calling him "Skinny", almost in a pejorative way.
Thus she attacked the young governor in the conversations he had within the PRO and also with Milei's own cabinet.
Other times.
Bullrich, with Torres and his girlfriend, Ornella, in a hotel in Trelew, in the last elections.
The hardest part of the statement that Bullrich will sign
and that has Torres as its central recipient says the following: "Aware of our responsibility to support the change that our voters and the majority of Argentines demand, we call for sanity to all those who share our vision of a federal country in which each province generates its own resources and is sustainable, in which the money printing machine stops financing privileges at the expense of the well-being of Argentines and in which the continuity and respect of the Constitution and the laws,
and not blackmail, be the starting point for the resolution of disputes and controversies
."
"Blackmail" is the word that will resonate loudly and summarizes what Bullrich thinks Torres did: extort Milei.
In another paragraph, he reinforces his differences with the Chubut native, a co-religionist within the PRO, but whom he accuses of playing internally near Mauricio Macri and moving "to two sides" in his relationship with the Government and the opposition.
"Today we witness, dismayed, the resistance of many governors to share the fiscal effort necessary to prevent a hyperinflationary crisis whose main victim would not be the government but the Argentines who inhabit all the provinces," he cries.
"Nacho" Torres prepares the lawsuit and relies on Macri
Last week,
a chat group made up of the 24 governors
began to be active .
In fact, it is called
"23 governors and one Head of Government"
and was created as a communication channel where all provincial leaders, without distinction of political color, present their positions regarding the relationship with the national government.
From that area came an energetic defense of Torres, who had already found support from the governors of Together for Change and also from those representing the southern provinces.
The Chubut native has decided to accelerate in the next few hours and formally present the lawsuit against the Nation for the decision to withhold his co-participation.
It will be in the same terms as the statement published on Friday on social networks.
"The provinces are pre-existing to the Nation and deserve respect. No one can subjugate them or extort them with threats of restriction of public funds that belong to them by right," he said in the document.
THE UNITED PROVINCES OF THE SOUTH
The provinces are pre-existing to the Nation and deserve respect.
No one can subjugate them or extort them with threats of restriction of public funds that belong to them by right.
In February the national government illegally detained us… pic.twitter.com/Qq2mJcW3W8
— Nacho Torres (@NachoTorresCH) February 23, 2024
It will not be the first complaint he makes against the Executive.
Last week, in the run-up to this conflict, the Rawson Justice accepted a request from the governor of Chubut and suspended the elimination of funds to subsidize transportation.
"Nacho plays hard and is going to defend the province," is the predominant comment from people who have known him for a long time and who anticipate that the tension will not decrease, regardless of the fact that at the provincial level an electoral alliance has been closed with the libertarians.
As a gesture against Milei, but above all against Bullrich,
Torres will be part of a zoom this Monday in which the three PRO governors will participate
- Rogelio Frigerio and Jorge Macri, the others - and the PRO bloc of the Chamber of Deputies, which leads Cristian Ritondo.
There
they will define absolute support for Mauricio Macri
to take over the presidency of the party as of March 19.
This support includes almost all sectors of the PRO, the most dialogue-oriented and the most rigid, and only those who still play close to Bullrich are left out.
This group believes that, in the short or long term, the minister will avoid confronting Macri within the party and will give way to him being the president in the next period.
"Patricia has too much to do with the management of the ministry, she is focused there," commented a source who speaks periodically with her.
Bullrich, however, believes that Macri is waiting for his opportunity to move forward with the integration of officials from his kidney into Milei's cabinet
, an idea that sounded strong at the beginning of the month and that in the midst of so many tensions was deactivated.
"The government coalition that they want to put together is going to be very difficult. In this context, impossible," say different political actors.