RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Alfredo Olmedo is one of the most controversial federal deputies in Argentina. He is proud to say that he has already met with Jair Bolsonaro. “With Bolsonaro, I talked about gender ideology and the right-wing. Because the Argentinian president, Mauricio Macri, is not right-wing, he pushed the debate on legalizing abortion in Congress,” he said.
Olmedo was thinking of running for president, but he eventually gave up. He says he would not trust the outcome because there is no structure in the whole country to fight fraud at the polls. He is now a pre-candidate for the government of the Salta province for the Ahora Patria party and will compete in the primaries against the mayor of Salta, Gustavo Sáenz.
An evangelical Christian since age two, he is proud to say that he was the first politician in Argentina to support Donald Trump, when the American had not yet been elected, and adds, jokingly, that it was, in fact, Bolsonaro who copied his conservative profile.
Olmedo’s proposals include mandatory military service for those who neither work nor study, drug use control for politicians, chemical castration for rapists, and the death penalty for cases of sexual abuse followed by death.
On the country’s most sensitive issue — the dictatorship — he says that it was a war, although he often uses the word “dictatorship” to refer to the time frame. “I’m the only one who tells the truth. They say 30,000 people were missing here, but the official figures are 6,876. Human rights in Argentina have become a business”, he says about the organizations of missing relatives.
The deputy claims to have the support of the population and says that other politicians do not have a discourse similar to his for “fear of media pressure”. Olmedo also means that the Argentinian press “speaks ill of Bolsonaro all the time”, but that, for his audience, having a photo alongside the Brazilian president is helpful.
The son of one of the country’s largest soybean producers — his father owns some 100,000 hectares of land — and the largest olive producer in Argentina, with 2,200 hectares, Olmedo has been criticized for exploiting workers. According to Argentine media, his employees said they had not received wages and were forced to work in the rain. However, the deputy told a reporter that the facilities he offered on his farms were “similar to those of a hotel.”