The makings of an economistJavier Gerardo Milei was born on October 2, 1970, in Buenos Aires. His father, Norberto, was a taxi driver and, eventually, the owner of a transport company. Norberto was also abusive, often beating little Javier, calling him “trash” and telling him he would die of hunger.“He was attacked and humiliated by his father; he had a really, really difficult life, and the Milei we see now is obviously a consequence of that,” Juan Luis González, author of “El Loco,” a biography of the Argentinian leader, told Al Jazeera.Only Karina tried to protect him, while Milei’s mother, Alicia, a housewife, was not violent but enabled the abuse by siding with her husband. Once, Karina witnessed Norberto beating her brother so severely that she suffered a panic attack.“Your sister is like this because of you,” Alicia had told her son. “If she dies, it’s your fault.”While he would later distance himself from his parents, even refusing to speak with them, Karina remained one of his closest confidants.At this time, from 1976 until 1983, Argentina was under military rule, following a coup d’etat set on exterminating so-called “terrorists”. Death squads murdered up to 30,000 suspected communist sympathisers during the Dirty War, and many more were tortured. Military rule ended shortly after Britain’s victory in the 1982 Falklands War – fought over contested islands 500km (300 miles) east of Argentina in the South Atlantic – and democracy returned with elections the following year.As a teenager, Mil …
