Mexican scientist Salvador Galindo Uribarri did not know who Javier Milei, candidate for the presidency of Argentina, was until a journalist contacted him in May of last year. It was at that moment when the researcher realized that an article he had written with two colleagues, Mario Rodríguez Mesa and Jorge Luis Cervantes Cota, had been plagiarized in Pandenomics, a book published by the far-right Argentine politician in 2020, six years after the original text came out. Days later, Galindo Uribarri bought it to see it with his own eyes. There were paragraphs and paragraphs of the introduction, of the historical passages to make reading more enjoyable, and of the equations he included to make his point clear. Everything had been copied by Milei. And at that moment, he decided that he was not going to sit idly by and that he was going to file a complaint through legal means. “The substantial part of the aforementioned article appears reproduced without prior and express authorization in the book,” reads the complaint of facts, to which EL PAÍS had access. “This in itself allegedly constitutes a crime,” it is added.
“At first, the plagiarism caused us hilarity but then, surprise: the surprising thing is that he didn’t even make an attempt to paraphrase the text,” said Galindo Uribarri, main author of The mathematics of epidemics: Mexico 2009 case and othersto the Argentine magazine News. The physicist, with a doctorate from the University of Oxford, interviewed journalists Tomás Rodríguez and Juan Luis González on May 17, 2022. Five days later, the scientist filed a legal complaint, not only on behalf of the affected authors. , but also from the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, which published the original writing in the magazine Ergo sum science in early 2014. “The problem is that no one has gone beyond a complaint. The idea is to reach the ultimate consequences,” she stated. The 72-year-old scientist, however, died of cancer on September 3, 2022, four months after giving the interview.
“He was offended to the core,” recalls his widow, Susana Bianconi, from Argentina. “Milei’s opportunism was evident, what she made of her tells you a lot about her impudence, her baseness, her contempt for other people and for her work,” she points out. “I imagine she must have put a team of students to do the copy paste [copiar y pegar] and that he didn’t even read it, even though he copied everything, even the anecdotes that my husband used to entertain the reader,” she says.
In the complaint, both texts are compared in two columns: the original ―on epidemic statistics― and Milei’s ―on the coronavirus pandemic―. “One morning in May 1665, George Vicars, a tailor from the small town of Eyam, England, received a package from London,” wrote Galindo Uribarri and his two co-authors in the introduction. Milei copied the same phrase and only added during at the beginning of the sentence, as stated in the electronic version of Pandenomics.
“Human beings are gregarious, a condition that has made it inevitable that epidemics will be recurrent throughout our history,” point out the Mexican authors, citing historian JN Hays. Milei barely changed the order of the sentence and did not put any reference.
The examples are so many that they occupy almost 10 pages of the judicial document. The Copy Leaks portal, which compares the coincidences between two texts, shows that the beginning of the second chapter of Milei’s book is 99.6% a faithful copy of the introduction of the article by Ergo sum science. Other anti-plagiarism tools, such as software Duplichecker, they detect that Milei’s lines actually come from Galindo Uribarri’s article.
Milei also collects entire paragraphs to explain mathematical models, uses equations with the same numerals, giving them as his own, and uses the same design for the graphs, the complaint states. The Libertad Avanza politician even maintained the use of the first person plural, as the scientists did, to detail the results: We observe, we underline, we wonder.
There is, however, a crucial difference between both texts. The one for Mexicans is free to access. Milei’s book, published by the Galerna publishing house, is sold on Amazon for $18.95 and $9.99 in the electronic version. “Milei markets her book whose royalties do not enter the coffers of the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico when they should, causing possible property damage,” the complaint reads.
The accusations of plagiarism have been a shadow that has accompanied Milei throughout his entire career, from academic publications to his own autobiography and his spots campaign. “Javier, I can’t cite your references well because in the last book you wrote, you have three complaints of plagiarism,” the ruling party Sergio Massa told him in the presidential debate last weekend, the last face to face before more than 35 million Argentines will go to the polls this Sunday to elect their next president.
The newspaper Profile published last year the most extensive journalistic investigation into the plagiarism of Pandenomics. The book also borrows from Spaniard Antonio Guirao, a physicist at the University of Murcia, and Gita Gopinath, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, among others. “It’s not that I had rehashed it, it was a complete copy and paste, paragraphs and paragraphs copied,” Guirao told this week The confidential. Her case goes a step further: Milei not only stole her research, he also distorted her conclusions and interpreted the results in a way to justify her own views.
The politician’s entourage has minimized each of the claims about plagiarism or has attributed it to the “nervousness” that he arouses in his adversaries. “I only remember some verbal statement that Milei made last year about how there had been only a few pages, as if to say ‘what are you complaining about?’” says Bianconi, the widow of one of the authors. On this occasion, Milei’s team did not comment.
At the end of August, Ramiro Vasena, pre-candidate for the alliance Releasefiled a complaint of plagiarism against Milei in a Buenos Aires court for Pandenomics, whom he described as “a compulsive plagiarist,” according to the Argentine media. Bianconi, however, was not aware of that case, nor has he known about the course of the lawsuit in Mexico.
“My husband’s email and phone died with him. If they answered him, I will never know,” Bianconi laments. “I don’t feel like I have the right to do it for him,” she admits about the possibility of continuing with the legal battle. This newspaper contacted the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, which did not comment before the publication of this report.
“Justice is very slow,” said Galindo Uribarri to News. A year after his death, his wife remembers him as the brilliant man who understood science as a great symphony; the popularizer who admired Einstein and who was obsessed with understanding the universe, the life partner who left her a splendid library and shared with her his love for nature. Bianconi still laughs when he remembers his books or overflows with emotion when talking about Physics. A legacy that cannot be imitated or stolen.
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