RÍO GRANDE, Tierra del Fuego.- Little will change tomorrow in this sparsely populated province, with low houses and tin roofs, where every day the wind, the protagonist of the conversations, makes the low temperatures less tolerable. The only doubt regarding the elections in the southernmost province of the country is the percentage with which the governor will win, Gustavo Melella, Salesian philosophy professor born in La Matanza, who made a political career in the Radical Civic Union (UCR) and turned to Kirchnerism during the second term of Cristina Kirchner to accumulate power.
All the polls project a bump from the ruling party for electoral Sunday and the chances of a runoff with the opposition, except for a miracle, are almost non-existent. The most conservative figures give Concertación Forging just over 50 percent; the most auspicious places him near 60. Opposite him has a divided opposition, which left the election served to the “teacher”, as his followers call him. The Pro, led by the national deputy Hector “Tito” Stefani with the support of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, plays split from the seal of Together for Change, headed by senator Paul White, who received the support, with visits, from the head of the party founded by Mauricio Macri, Patricia Bullrich, the former governor of Buenos Aires, Mary Eugenia Vidal and the governor of Jujuy and president of the UCR, Gerardo Morales.
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In his environment they attribute the probable success of Melella at the polls to his administration and their ability to articulate political wills. In opposition, to a facility for the preaching which, combined with taking on debt and hiring public employees, hides -they say- a terrible provincial management.
“El curita” (his other nickname) was 26 years old in 1997 when he left San Justo, in La Matanza, his hometown, to settle in Tierra del Fuego. Received as a philosophy professor, he landed in the congregation of Río Grande, the city with the largest number of inhabitants in the southern province, which grew exponentially each year with the arrival of thousands of Argentines expelled from the center and north by the economic crisis during the menemism
During his first years in the arid southern lands, from a position at the Salesian Agrotechnical School, he cultivated a humble profile, with religious preaching that he never abandoned again. He has a helpful look to the neighbor, to be a doer. Like Don Bosco, or the priest Brochero, he is one of those guys with a different profile that surpasses his role, ”a faithful collaborator described him, in advance of the elections.
“You will always see him with the same checkered shirt and worn-out pants and shoes. And probably in his closet he has 50 of each. His business is humility and religion, the submissive tone”, qualified an opposition leader. In the local sphere of Together for Change, they only recognize the ability to convince. Not so to govern: they saddle him with the highest rate of public employees in the country; the deficit in industrial development; an indiscriminate indebtedness through the issuance of bills from the Legislature; and the lack of infrastructure in public hospitals and schools, among a long list of issues.
At the beginning of the new millennium, Melella turned his religious imprint to his political career. Under the wing of radicalism he went through different municipal positions, until in 2011, with the support of his boss, the radical Jorge Martín, who could not be re-elected, He made the leap to the administration. But three years later, in search of new majorities that would allow him to be re-elected, he let go of the hand of his mentor from the centenary party and joined Kirchnerism, hand in hand with Gustavo Lopez, then Undersecretary of the Presidency of Cristina Kirchner and founder of Concertación Forja, the force that had managed to transform co-religionists into companions during the rise of the Front for Victory. In honor of the alliance with López formed a new local front, which it called Concertación Fueguina, a marriage between the local party, Movimiento Popular Fueguino (MOPOF), and the Patagonian Social Party (PSP).
It was during his second term in Río Grande that he set his sights a step higher, in the executive of the province, and the relationship with the then governor, Roxanne Bertone, That until then had been cordial, turned into a merciless battle that intensified when Melella received a complaint from three construction workers for alleged coercive sexual abuse that forced him to take leave from his post.
The mayor denounced that behind the cause there was a political operation Bertone to complicate his choice, as he said in an interview, to punish him for “his status as homosexual.” The radical K ended up prevailing over the governor at the polls, with a 12-point advantage. The case continued, slowly, until last year, when Judge Raúl Nahim Sahade dismissed it, understanding that the intimate relations, despite the fact that the masons had said otherwise, had been consensual.
During the Cambiemos government, Melella remained largely confined to his province. He only came out to the national arena on specific occasions, with crosses against Mauricio Macri, for example, in relation to the retirement system. In 2019 he supported the Frente de Todos, and in the last three years he received Alberto Fernández twice, who, on the other hand, never visited neighboring Santa Cruz.
However, he also sought to maintain the link with the hard wing. He appeared on different occasions with the Kirchnerist Interior Minister, Eduardo “Wado” de Pedro, in charge of relations with the provinces. And at the beginning of this year he was one of the governors who traveled to the Casa Rosada to support in person the impeachment request to the Supreme Court, together with the Cristinistas Axel Kicillof (Buenos Aires), Gerardo Zamora (Santiago del Estero ) and Jorge Capitanich (Chaco). For now, Melella has not given explicit support to any of the FDT presidential candidates, but those who know him say that he favors a unity candidate instead of PASO, and they mention Sergio Massa, the head of the Treasury a priori endorsed by CFK.
Last year, like most governors, he doubled the date of the national elections and in the months of the campaign he barely showed up with national leaders. Everything indicates that tomorrow night, a few hours after the close of the elections, Melella will once again be able to toast his cabinet in the Club San Martín bunker, in Río Grande, far from the national leaders of the FDT. To his relief, he will only receive Alberto Fernández next Friday.
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