In his first official speech on the steps of the Argentine Congress, President Javier Milei used the event to depict an apocalyptic scenario and attack the outgoing government of Alberto Fernández. Argentine journalists began to weigh in on the facts he cited in presenting his administration’s planned austerity measures as unavoidable. 

Mauro Brissio, an AmericaTV reporter, posted a thread on X targeting Milei’s exaggerated claims on issues like pandemic deaths, schooling levels, and car crash deaths.

“During the pandemic, if Argentina had done what the average of countries did, we would have had 30,000 dead. But thanks to the inefficiency of the State that ‘looks out for us’, 130,000 Argentine people lost their lives,” Milei said in his speech.

Brissio, who also wrote a book called Fake News — All news are false until proven otherwise, responded with an infographic from Our World in Data organization, a collaborative effort between researchers at the University of Oxford and the non-profit organization Global Change Data Lab.  It showed that by September 2022, Argentina had a lower rate of deaths per 100,000 people than neighboring countries like Peru, Mexico, Chile and Brazil. 

“If you measure the excess mortality rate between January 2020 and March 2021, Argentina stands out in the regional context,” Brissio wrote. 

Milei had also depicted Argentina as a “blood bath” in terms of crime levels. However 2022 data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime show that there were 4.3 homicides per 100,000 people last year.

“A very lower rate than most Latin American countries. For example, the ratio reached 21.3 in Brazil, 6.7 in Chile, and 11.2 in Uruguay,” said Brissio. 

Schooling levels were also targeted by the far-right president. “Just to give you a picture of the deterioration we live in, only 16% of kids graduate on time from school, only 16 out of 100, 84% don’t finish school on time,” he said.

“False,” said Brissio, quoting an article that showed a news headline Milei had based his claim on. 

“52% of students finish high school in due time — stipulated to be 11 years— in a country where the primary schooling rate is among the highest in the world. More than half the rest (nearly 25% of the total) finishes high school later, according to 2020 figures,” said Brissio.

“In order to bring down the number of kids who ‘finish school in due time’ from 52% to 16%, as Milei dared to tell voters, legislators, and foreign heads of state, he mixed a survey on the minimum required math knowledge and reading comprehension figures the NGO regarded as measurable, among many other methodologies that show other results.”

Finally, the amount of car crash deaths in Argentina also appears to be highly exaggerated, as President Milei stated that “nearly 15,000 Argentines die every year due to car accidents”.

Brissio posted official statistics from the National Agency of Traffic Safety, which showed that in 2022 (the most recent data available) the number of car accident deaths in Argentina was 3,828.

“Now, according to numbers from the civil organization Luchemos por la Vida — which measures victims at the site of the crash and those who die within 30 days after the accident — 6,184 people died in car accidents in 2022,” he added. 

Former Buenos Aires Herald director Sebastián Lacunza also debunked Milei’s outsized figures in an article in elDiario.ar, fact-checking issues like job creation, fiscal deficit, and inflation rates.

“Javier Milei mixed real numbers with others of questionable origin, and even straight up made them up to describe ‘the worst inheritance in history,’” he wrote.

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