From Mengele to Milei: A Political Psychoanalysis of a Nation

No country is as obsessed with who it believes itself to be, and as skilled at hiding who it truly is, as Argentina. Nations invent myths to project strength; others craft them to soften their weaknesses. Argentina built its myths to escape the unbearable fact of being itself. For more than a century, the country cultivated a polished, European self-image, sophisticated, aristocratic even, as if trying to convince the world, and itself, that the Río de la Plata somehow emptied directly into the Seine. Beneath the varnish of elegant cafés, celebrated psychoanalysts and a melancholy elevated to cultural identity, there persisted a far less luminous, far less universalist, and far less European history: that of a nation that, time and again, chose to forget.

Argentina’s European fantasy was not the result of accident or innocence, it was a project. In the late nineteenth century, as waves of Italian and Spanish immigrants arrived, Buenos Aires convinced itself that it was less a South American capital than a distant cousin of Paris, a city misplaced by a caprice of geography. Local elites, nourished by French literature and Creole resentments, set about molding the country accordingly: opera houses, grand boulevards, cafés modeled on Saint-Germain, public policies designed to “whiten” the population, and a rhetoric that insisted the Latin American future, tragic, turbulent, unpredictable, was not their concern. Argentina imagined itself European because it needed to be anything other than what it was.

This fantasy was not upheld by elites alone. The urban middle class became its most loyal guardian. Buenos Aires, in particular, transformed denial into a daily discipline, almost a form of mental hygiene. While the country’s interior oscillated between chronic poverty and quasi-feudal provincial governments, the capital cultivated the luxury of looking only at itself, its cafés, its newspapers, its analysts, its neuroses. Psychoanalysis, celebrated as a symbol of sophistication, served for decades as a civilizing ritual that allowed the middle class to discuss the father, the mother, desire, and anguish, provided they never mentioned the country. In this urban, self-absorbed Argentina, Europe was not a continent; it was an antidote. A graceful way of escaping the weight of history, as long as one accepted the cost of forgetting it.

By the end of World War II, Argentina had perfected the art of looking away. Its prolonged neutrality during the conflict had been a dress rehearsal for this posture. While the world tore itself apart, the country preserved a comfortable ambiguity: it did not side with the Allies, nor did it sever its cultural and diplomatic ties with Germany. When the war ended, Argentina was morally unburdened and politically available. Buenos Aires offered silence, clean papers, and an emotional geography welcoming, almost naturally, to men who should have been consigned to the margins of humanity. It was not naivete, nor historical accident, it was choice. Argentina preferred to believe it was importing “scientists,” “technicians,” “Europeans of value,” when in truth it was receiving criminals who found not only physical refuge there, but a social environment unwilling to ask questions. The country that dreamed of being Europe discovered, too late, that some shadows cross oceans more easily than light.

If the arrival of Nazis in Argentina could, in theory, be explained by diplomatic convenience, postwar chaos, or lapses in vigilance, the case of Josef Mengele destroyed any such excuses. The presence of Auschwitz’s physician, not a bureaucrat of evil but its artisan, laid bare a silent pact the nation maintained with itself: the pact of not knowing. For decades, documents were ignored, clues muffled, reports minimized. It was not merely that Mengele lived in Argentina, it was that his presence there produced no moral dissonance. He frequented clubs, walked through seaside towns, forged polite friendships, and none of this led the country to ask why one of the world’s most wanted men felt so comfortable on its soil. Argentina did not hide him, it simply chose not to find him. And that choice, more than his escape, exposed the deep fracture between the European self-image the country cherished and the historical reality it refused to confront. Mengele was an unwelcome guest, yes, but also an immaculate mirror: revealing, step by step, that the Argentina that called itself refined, cultured, and European had always lived more comfortably with its ghosts than with its responsibilities.

The Falklands War (Malvinas) was perhaps the most revealing chapter of Argentina’s national psychology: a country accustomed to viewing Europe as a mirror suddenly decided to challenge it as one challenges a distant relative. The military dictatorship believed it was engaged in a symbolic, quasi-moral confrontation with a decadent empire, ignoring that it was in fact facing a real, fully functional power one that saw Argentina not as a civilizational rival but as a peripheral adversary. It was an act of self-deception dressed as bravery. The population, educated for decades to believe its destiny was European, marched to war as if claiming an inheritance. Britain responded the way nations respond when they have never doubted who they are. The defeat exposed, all at once, Argentina’s military fragility, diplomatic naivety, and identity delusion. It was not merely a battlefield failure; it was a reckoning with the fantasy.

If the dictatorship fell on the battlefield, the Argentine myth survived untouched. The defeat did not trigger introspection, but yet another layer of fiction: one in which Argentina had not been defeated by a global power but betrayed by fate, logistics, or international abandonment. And so, with the return to democracy, the country entered a new era carrying real scars and renewed illusions. Decades later, Kirchnerism would transform these illusions into statecraft: a narrative oscillating between genuine historical justice and emotional revisionism, offering the nation what it had always sought, not an identity, but anesthesia. It was populism, yes, but also unresolved psychoanalysis: the State as national therapist, providing consoling explanations for a history that had never found its axis. When the cycle ended, the vacuum did not provoke debate, it was filled by another fantasy, this time of the opposite sign.

Javier Milei did not appear as rupture but as synthesis, the polished product of a country oscillating for decades between nostalgia and delirium. A libertarian who speaks like an outsider, behaves like a caudillo, and captivates precisely because he promises to destroy what Argentina stubbornly refuses to understand. His incendiary rhetoric, marketed as rebellion against the system, resonated with a society exhausted by its own illusions, though not enough to abandon them. Milei became the perfect avatar of the Argentine fantasy: a man promising to “restart” the country as one restarts a frozen computer, with the childlike hope that, after a brief blackout, the system will return to its ideal state, an imaginary extension of Europe, or perhaps of North America.

There is something deeply symbolic in his rise. A man who denounces the State yet behaves like a state prophet, who attacks political “castes” yet cultivates near-religious devotion, who claims to oppose old structures yet repeats, with fresh enthusiasm, the same mechanisms of denial that run through Argentine history. It is no accident that many of his followers see him less as a president than as a kind of national surgeon, authorized to excise what they believe to be the disease of the country, as if Argentina might finally be “cured” of its South American condition.

In Milei, Argentina found not a future but a metaphor, another narrative layer atop an identity that has never resolved itself. He is the improvised heir to twentieth-century Europeanism, to Kirchnerist emotional revisionism, and to the elitist melancholy that has always treated the country as a cartographic mistake. His ascent reveals not only Argentina’s desperation but the persistence of its founding myth: the belief that somewhere between Palermo and Paris lives an ideal version of the nation that a sufficiently daring leader might one day liberate. It is an old fantasy, merely re-packaged: the dream of waking up European after another sleepless South American night.

South America has watched all of this with the patient familiarity of a continent that knows the script. While its neighbors accumulated coups, dictatorships, painful transitions, and difficult reconstructions, Argentina seemed to move at a private tempo, always convinced it did not belong to the continent to which geography, culture, and destiny had tied it. Brazil learned to stumble and rise institutionally, Chile turned trauma into method, Uruguay built a democracy that appears stubbornly civil, Colombia reinvented itself after half a century of armed conflict. Even nations often ignored by global headlines, Bolivia, Paraguay, demonstrated, at various moments, political resilience greater than anyone credited them with.

Argentina, however, remained loyal to its founding myth: that its suffering was too European to be Latin American, and its failures too sophisticated to be called failures. This emotional distance allowed the country to cultivate the illusion that it did not share the region’s flaws, and therefore never learned from its scars. Across the century, moments abounded when the entire continent reorganized itself, confronted its ghosts, judged its executioners, rebuilt its institutions. And in the decisive moments, Argentina was absent. Preferring to gaze toward an external horizon that never acknowledged it, insisting on belonging to a world that, for all practical purposes, does not want it as an equal.

So today, when we look at Argentina’s crisis, its political convulsions, its laboratory leaders, its compulsive reinvention of identity, we see less a country in collapse than a nation trapped in a dream that became a cage. It is not indifference, it is lament. A continent long treated as inferior watches, with quiet sorrow, a country that could be anchor and lighthouse choosing instead to be exception and exile.

In the end, the Mengele case reveals not only Argentina’s selective morality but the political solitude of a continent. South America, with all its imperfections, has tried for decades to build a minimal pact of belonging, and fails, repeatedly, in part because one piece is missing: Argentina. Precisely the country that could serve as axis and equilibrium, the one with too much literature to be cynical, too much talent to be authoritarian, too much history to continue pretending it belongs to another hemisphere.

But Argentina insists. Insists on gazing at Europe as if it were a mirror rather than a window, as if it were a future to be reached, not a past to be surpassed. Insists on believing its destiny lies an ocean away rather than a few kilometers from Uruguay. Insists on denying that it is Latin American, as if rejecting its own geography could somehow elevate it. And while it insists, the continent loses one of the countries that could most enrich it.

Brazil tries. Colombia grows. Chile matures. Bolivia imagines. Peru stumbles. And all of them, in their own ways, look toward Buenos Aires, waiting for it to finally take its seat at the table. But it does not sit. It prefers the stage of nostalgia, the Parisian fantasy, the imaginary ballroom where it still dances with European ghosts, some of them far too dangerous to have been invited.

The uncomfortable, perhaps inevitable truth is this: South America still cannot count on Argentina. Not because it lacks greatness, but because it lacks decision. Not because it lacks potential, but because it lacks belonging. And as long as Argentina continues fighting the simple fact of being South American, as if it were an accident of history rather than its defining condition, it will remain absent from the very continent it could help transform.

Perhaps one day Argentina will abandon the European mirror and finally look out the window of the South. Perhaps then it will discover it lost nothing, except decades. Until that day, the continent waits with the quiet sadness of those who know the value of what they cannot yet have. And Argentina remains with its eternal dilemma: to continue dreaming of being European, or finally become the country South America has always hoped it would be.