There is developing scandal and political crisis from the leak of Diego Spagnuolo’s audio messages and claims of alleged kickbacks at the ANDIS national disability agency, involving high-profile politicians – such as ruling party figures Karina Milei, Eduardo ‘Lule’ Menem and Martín Menem. But behind the controversy, there is information that reveals how the government manipulated data and figures to justify its ongoing “chainsaw” spending cuts affecting such a disadvantaged sector of the population.
In February earlier this year, President Javier Milei’s government relaunched an audit of one million recipients of disability benefits (formally known as non-contributory pensions for “work disability”). The process was begun formally in August 2024 – the same date that Spagnuolo’s audio recordings were made, though they only saw the light of day in August.
The review was announced by Spagnuolo, the former head of ANDIS, on his X account on August 22, 2024. “With these audits, we seek transparency for the system of non-contributory pensions for work disability so that those who really need them and conform to the law keep them and receive them,” he wrote in a message.
A year on, the numbers of Spagnuolo’s crusade speak for themselves. According to official data, 997,654 letters were sent by registered delivery. Out of that total, 504,802 were unable to be delivered (50.6 percent). Out of the 492,852 people who received the letter, 451,579 made an appointment (91.6 percent) as required. In addition, 7,211 people were identified as deceased and there were 9,027 waivers issued. In 418,374 cases, the audit is ongoing.
On August 27, Cabinet Chief Guillermo Francos informed Congress that 111,463 benefit payments had been suspended. It is worth noting that there are journalistic reports ofa bonus system that operated at ANDIS, spearheaded by Spagnuolo himself, to “reward” the body’s agents based on the number of benefits terminated.
In line with the numbers presented to start the audit in August 2024, late last month, a week after Spagnuolo’s voice messages were disclosed, Francos appeared before Congress to deliver a performance report. In it, he said: “It’s completely outrageous that now they [the opposition] disguise themselves as the guards of morals and claim public works, infrastructure and increases for every social sector, when they themselves abandoned pensioners, liquefying 30 percent of their income in the last year of their administration; granted irregular and unfounded disability benefits, increasing the number of beneficiaries by 1,418 percent since 2003, and leaving beneficiaries with a 118-percent lag. Let me remind you that the 2023 inflation was 211 percent, and for beneficiaries it was only updated by 93 percent. Wasn’t that cruel?”
A day later, Economy minister Luis ‘Toto’ Caputo, together with Central Bank Governor Santiago Bausili, appeared on the libertarian streaming channel Carajo. The minister stated: “In 2001 we had 75,000 disabled people and Argentina had approximately 36 million inhabitants. Today we have 46 million. Proportionately, there should be 97,000 disabled people. There are 1,250,000!”
Plainly, the core of the government’s discourse to justify cutbacks is grounded in the fact that if we have gone from 80,000 people on disability benefits to 1,250,000 “without a war in between.” But this may be a con.
It is worth remembering that the first to speak on this topic was Presidential Spokesperson Manuel Adorni. On Friday July 19, 2024, at a press conference, he initially appealed with visual impact: he showed the x-ray of a dog which might have been used to justify a benefit being granted.
The controversy over the cutbacks in disability welfare payments had already kicked up a political storm even before Spagnuolo’s voice messages were released. The topic has escalated to presidential vetoes and an intense legislative debate in both Chambers of Congress. This was in addition to questionable statements by Spagnuolo himself made to the family of child Ian Moche, together with a judicial and media war driven by the President against the boy, who has autism. Discontent by medical providers and disabled people was materialised on several occasions in street protests by the affected sectors, one of which was repressed on Tuesday, August 5, after Milei’s veto to the Disability Emergency Law. On August 20, the lower house Chamber of Deputies rejected the presidential veto and now the Senate must state its opinion.
In order to understand the scope of the ruling party’s manipulation of data as to disability benefits and the ongoing adjustment, it is necessary to learn some history first.
As reconstructed by a report from the Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ) NGO, non-contributory pensions for “work disability” were created in 1973 after Law No. 13,478 was amended. In 1997, that statute was regulated by Decree 432/97, which created the “pension for labour disability” and in turn regulated its requirements. Until 2003, the prevailing system was of “one benefit granted for each one removed,” which kept a fixed number of benefits, that is, a “quota.” In that year, the benefit was opened to the real demand of people who could meet the requirements in the 1997 decree.
Belén Arcucci, Coordinator of ACIJ’s Programme of Disabled People’s Rights, says: “This flexibilisation of requirements and the elimination of the ‘quota’ which operated not under a specific statute but rather by custom entailed that more people could access disability benefits, not an increase of the number of disabled people, as the government claims.”
Arcucci adds another element: “We don’t find it proper to talk of ‘work disability’ pensions, as it is stigmatising and they are also much more than that, they are an income transfer policy aimed at alleviating the structural inequalities faced by disabled people in Argentina. Its amount is 70 percent of a minimum pension and it enables access to the healthcare coverage of the Incluir Salud [assistance]programme.”
“On the other hand, we find it problematic that they measure ‘labour disability’ in percentages, as required to access the benefit. The 2024 decrees lowered it to 66 percent, before 2023 it was at 76 percent, but the current government established much more discriminatory requirements,” said the ACIJ member.
In 2008, Argentina ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and in 2014, Congress gave it constitutional hierarchy (Law 27,044). After the ratification of the CRPD, the requirements to access non-contributory pensions for ‘labour disability’ under Decree 432/97 became unconstitutional.
The exponential increase of benefits between 2003 and 2025, which according to official data of the Statistical Social Security Newsletter published by the Chequeado portal went from 75,000 to 1.2 million, is not actually explained by “a war,’ but by a flexible interpretation of the provisions of the CRPD, besides the fact that the statutory requirements to access the benefit stayed the same from 1997 to 2023.
Following the timeline, in January 2023, then-president Alberto Fernández’s government issued Decree 7/23, and in November 566/23, which amended Decree 432/97 and reversed some of the problems pointed out by Argentine courts and the UN Committee.
In September 2024, already during Javier Milei’s government, via Decree 843/24, the Executive Branch once again amended Decree 432/97 and modified the requirements to access benefits again.
The ACIJ’s report points out the following critical balance: “This new regulatory framework installed by Decree 843/24 entails a return to the medical model, it violates the rights to social protection and independent life under the CRPD, it dismisses the unconstitutionality declarations by courts and violates the many notifications by the United Nations to Argentina to modify its regulations on this subject matter.”
According to official data tracked by the INDEC national statistics bureau, in Argentina there are 5,114,190 people “with a permanent difficulty or limitation and prevalence of the permanent difficulty or limitation” (2010 Census). It is 12.9 percent of the population, which is within the world average standards, between 10 and 14 percent. By applying that very percentage to the 2022 Census data, the figure amounts to 5,964,293. This means that currently only 20 percent of people with some kind of disability receive a non-contributory pension (PNC).
On the other hand, according to official data supplied by ANDIS itself, informed by Francos in his second performance report, 1,900,061 people had a Single Disability Certificate (CUD) in force in this country as of March 2025, and in turn 1,193,523 people received non-contributory pensions. This accounts for 4.1 percent of the total population.
That is, disability numbers can be read from the perspective of the “glass half empty” and a historical debt by the State and the successive governments: out of the five million with some kind of disability in Argentina, 1.9 million have a CUD certificate and 1.2 million are on a non-contributory pension for “labour disability” by the State as of September 2024 (last data available from the Social Security Administration or ANSES), which will be 294,194 pesos (including the 70,000-peso bonus) with the September update, well below the basic food basket which measures the destitution line, which as of June is at 506,008 pesos.
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