For a week, a singer who had retired from the stage in 2017 generated more buzz than the president of Argentina—who dominates the national digital scene by a wide margin the rest of the year—and brought to light a massive, intergenerational, and politically charged community. Carlos Solari, the legendary voice of Patricio Rey y los Redonditos de Ricota, once declared: “They say I’m a ‘K,’ and yes, I’m a bit of a Kirchnerist, just as I’m a bit of a communist, a bit of a socialist, and a bit of a Peronist.” Consequently, this cultural death had a profound impact on those in power and on public opinion. An exploratory look at that conversation on social media reveals the magnitude of this farewell and draws some conclusions.
A man who hadn’t performed live in nine years
On the morning of June 5, 2026, “Indio” Solari’s caregiver found him lifeless next to the pool at his home in Parque Leloir. He was 77 years old and had been living with Parkinson’s disease for a decade; the cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage resulting from a hypertensive crisis. Solari had not given a concert since Olavarría 2017—that show attended by 300,000 people that ended with two deaths.
And yet his death sparked a mobilization in Plaza de Mayo between Friday, June 5, and Saturday, June 6—a historic funeral ceremony—and also took over television 24/7 and social media.
To put this into perspective, I wanted to compare two terms in public social media conversation over the course of a year: Indio and Milei. Javier Milei is the figure who generates the most digital conversation in Argentina. Measuring “Indio” against that benchmark allows us to see the true scale of what happened. We had to filter out some mentions of the word “Indio” because it drew in a few other results that weren’t relevant (due to the word’s other meanings), but these were very marginal.
Crushed for twelve months; one week “like a diver’s fart”
Over the course of twelve months, President Milei clearly outpaced “Indio” Solari in volume: 39.7 million mentions versus 2.3 million, a ratio of about seventeen to one. The singer barely registered—between five and thirty thousand authors per week—a nearly flat line at the bottom of the graph.
Then he died. That week, El Indio drew 1.17 million unique authors; Milei, 674 thousand. For the first time in the period, a musician displaced the president from the center of the conversation. The peak was more than thirty times the average of his previous weeks. Paraphrasing President Javier Milei, who predicted that the Argentine economy would rise “like a diver’s fart,” we can say the same of mentions of the singer (the original Spanish, “como pedo de buzo,” uses “pedo” in this country as a synonym for drunkenness, but it also means flatulence, while “buzo” here means someone who goes diving).
It wasn’t a campaign push or a government scandal: it was a period of mourning. The fact that a death can reshape—even if only for a few days—Argentina’s digital agenda says little about the algorithm and a lot about what that name meant.
Who mourned him on social media: mourning across social divides
The conversation also reveals who spoke out. And the first thing that stands out is its breadth. Looking at their occupations, the people who mentioned “El Indio” range from the classroom to the sports field: journalists, yes, but also students, athletes, lawyers, teachers, and artists. It goes beyond the very contemporary category of fandoms or fans of a particular musical genre: it is a cross-section of the country’s active life.
The other lens—that of interests—confirms the same thing from a different angle. El Indio brings together journalism, politics, music, motherhood, rock, law, and soccer in almost equal measure: a map of everyday attachments, not of a niche. That two distinct categories—professions and interests—yield the same result is precisely what supports the idea of mourning across social divides.
The contrast with Milei is telling. Around the President, the conversation centers on politics, the economy, and journalism; around El Indio, it is divided among culture, occupations, and attachments. Where one organizes a political divide, the other organizes a public.
The gender breakdown points in the same direction: among authors whose gender was estimated, women accounted for 40% of the conversation about “El Indio,” compared to 34% in the conversation about Milei. A somewhat more balanced audience.
Sociologist and anthropologist Pablo Semán and former National Secretary of Culture Pablo Avelluto (2018-2019) both interpreted the phenomenon as cross-class and multigenerational: a meeting point that cuts across classes, occupations, and ages. The data from this exploratory analysis point in the same direction.
More a farewell than a political divide—but still a dispute
The prevailing tone was one of tribute. El Indio received twice as many positive mentions as Milei (14.8% versus 7.4%) and had fewer negative mentions (31.4% versus 37.4%). In a country accustomed to measuring everything through the lens of political division, the conversation surrounding his death was, comparatively, more affectionate.
But that negative third is not noise. El Indio’s death also became a battleground. The government refused to make the Casa Rosada or Congress available for an official tribute; the massive farewell ceremony was ultimately organized in Avellaneda—at the “Mono” Gatica Sports Complex—through the efforts of Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof and La Cámpora leader Máximo Kirchner, who is very close to the singer’s family. Given the exploratory nature of this analysis, we did not perform sentiment classification focused on the object—what is commonly called object-based sentiment. This distinction is key: a negative mention could express sadness over the death, anger over the organization of the tribute, criticism of the government, a recollection of Olavarría 2017, or explicit rejection of Indio himself. Therefore, the sentiment data should not be interpreted as an exact proportion of support or rejection, but rather as an indicator.
| Object | Sentiment |
|---|---|
| Indio Solari | Positive / admiring |
| Death event | Negative / painful |
The precise distinction in sentiment emerges when we distinguish general sentiment from sentiment toward the specific object
From within the ruling party and libertarian circles, some voices downplayed his significance: a businessman who, they said, sold rebellion to the masses, as can be seen in the tweet by Nicolás Márquez (one of the intellectuals closest to the La Libertad Avanza government and Milei’s biographer). The president himself, whose frequency of posting content on X is among the highest of any head of government worldwide (from 12/10/2023 to 09/15/2025, he generated 3,412 original posts and 110,237 reposts, averaging approximately 176 posts per day over that period), remained completely silent on the matter, something journalist Rolando Graña noted when he said that the “government was very uncomfortable” with the death and the massive expressions of affection. This was striking for President Milei’s followers, given that he may be the “most rock-and-roll president in the world” (you can see my analysis of this contradiction here). The libertarian president of the National Chamber of Deputies, Martín Menem, was one of the few to make a brief statement, offering his condolences and, in response to a request from the Peronist-Kirchnerist parliamentary bloc, explaining that according to the government there were no conditions for holding the wake in the National Congress (although the funeral ceremony of Eva Duarte de Perón, “Evita,” was held there and drew a much larger crowd). This adds weight to Graña’s thesis, and the result was that the funeral on Sunday, June 7, was organized in the southern part of the metropolitan area surrounding the City of Buenos Aires, specifically in the municipality of Avellaneda, led by the Peronist-Kirchnerist Jorge Ferraresi.
Of course, former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner—who is serving a court-ordered sentence under house arrest—spoke out, as did the aforementioned Buenos Aires Governor Axel Kicillof and the most recent Peronist-Kirchnerist presidential candidate, Sergio Massa. Although his organization “Argentina Humana” did so, Juan Grabois, a presidential hopeful from the same political bloc, did not post anything online but did participate in the procession in the municipality of Avellaneda. The star of Argentine Trotskyist communism, Myriam Bregman—who is currently the political leader with the most positive public image in the country—recalled the singer during an event of the Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores-Unidad (FITU): “It was the only mass I attended” (referring to the term used for ricotero concerts).
The polarization, which the mourning period seemed to suspend, resurfaced in the fine print.
- A cultural death beat day-to-day politics.
- For a week, the mourning for a musician generated more conversation than the President who dominates the scene all year round.
- The Ricotera community is still there, broad-based and ready to mobilize.
- It spans classes, genders, and generations. It is not a niche tribe but a massive, latent audience, capable of mobilizing peacefully and on a large scale.
- The mourning was, at the same time, a political mirror.
- The mobilization was very Argentine: it also included a celebration of Solari’s art. But beyond the grief, the government’s distance amplified the expression of social unrest.
- The lack of shared rituals was laid bare.
- The fact that a Ricotera farewell serves as one of the few mass gathering points in Argentina speaks volumes both about “El Indio” and about the country that mourns him.
About the data: The charts are based on monitoring of public conversation on X (Twitter), YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok between June 2025 and June 2026. The volumes are estimates based on a sample of the activity recorded on each platform and are intended for comparing trends rather than being read as exact figures. Sentiment, gender, and interests are automatically inferred from profiles and post content and should be interpreted as approximations. “Authors” refers to unique accounts that posted at least once; “mentions” refers to the total number of posts.
P.S.: If you’re interested in obtaining an in-depth and comprehensive analysis of the entire conversation, we at Sustantiva | Data & Estrategia can do it—in that case, please contact us.
