Argentina’s former president Alberto Fernández, a leading Peronist who oversaw what was arguably the most progressive administration in the country’s history, has been accused by his former domestic partner of repeated physical abuse and harassment, in a scandal that has captured the attention of Latin America and shaken Argentina’s left-wing Peronist movement to its core.
Court filings show that Fabiola Yañez, who served as first lady of Argentina during Fernández’s presidency, from 2019 to 2023, but now lives in Spain, accused the ex-president of subjecting her to “daily phone harassment” and “psychological terrorism” aimed at “intimidating” her and of violently beating her on several occasions during their relationship. Investigators assigned to the case also discovered messages and photos detailing the alleged abuse on the cellphone of Fernández’s private secretary, according to court-sealed documents obtained by the Argentine newspaper Clarín. Yañez sent Fernández’s secretary photos of her injuries after the president allegedly beat her, including “one with an eye and part of her upper maxillary very swollen due to alleged blows and another one with visible bruising all along the right side of her thorax, with purplish ribs and pit on that side,” according to the newspaper. To top it all off, some of Fernández’s presidential advisers reportedly witnessed his physical abuse of Yañez on certain occasions.
Fernández has denied the allegations, but the evidence — from the presence of witnesses to photos of the abuse aftermath — seems damning. Unsurprisingly, the right-wing government of President Javier Milei has been quick to point out the flagrant hypocrisy of Fernández’s conduct, given the latter’s strident advocacy as president for feminism, “gender inclusivity,” and hyper-progressive social policies. Mariano Cúneo Libarona, Milei’s justice minister, described the allegations as “another proof of gender hypocrisy,” noting that Fernández was the one who created the since-abolished Ministry of Women, Genders, and Diversity, with hundreds of employees and a budget of several million U.S. dollars. Milei recalled in a lengthy social-media post that it was Fernández and his supporters who frequently accused critics of their gender policies of being “sexist, violent, and misogynistic.”
Fernández can also take credit for instituting a policy requiring that 1 percent of public-sector job slots be set aside for transgender-identifying people, legalizing abortion, allowing an “X” gender option on national-identity cards and passports, and aggressively supporting an “inclusive language” movement that seeks to abolish gender distinctions in the Spanish language (Fernández’s advocacy and use of grammatically incorrect, gender-neutral Spanish was the subject of a friendly New York Times profile in 2020).
During his presidency, Fernández was a zealot, even by American progressive standards, for enacting hard-left social policies. The beliefs he championed could probably not even be adequately described as “woke”: His ideological agenda, which went far beyond the populist-progressive policies pushed by Peronist presidential predecessors like the Kirchners, sought to strike at the very fabric of Argentine society by revising everything from passports to the language itself. Now that same man becomes the first Argentine president to be accused of gender-based domestic violence. It’s clear that the progressive Peronism of Alberto Fernández was nothing more than a cynical and sanctimonious Pharisaism.