Mariano ‘Tute’ Di Tella needed to make a special delivery. The 45-year-old mechanic took the elevator down in his ordinary building, hopped on the Buenos Aires subway with his son Milo and headed downtown with a big bag.
They lugged it off the subway after more than a dozen stops and through the city center’s streets until Tute, as he’s known, and Milo arrived at the presidential palace, Casa Rosada. Inside the bag sat a custom-made, aluminum and bronze chainsaw that Argentine President Javier Milei would hand over to Elon Musk. Fuel not included.
When the world’s richest man — who is spearheading a mission to cut government spending and red tape as part of the Trump administration — received his gift from Milei on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, he declared that the power saw was “the chainsaw of all bureaucracy.”
Perhaps no one is more thrilled than Di Tella. He rejoices that the custom chainsaws filling his one-bedroom apartment have come to symbolize the radical change that made Milei famous around the world.
“The chainsaw is an instrument of power that I made so that he can make a change and not just an economic change,” said Di Tella, referring to Milei.
Over his glass dinner table, Di Tella is now preparing his next project: A chainsaw for Donald Trump. He says Milei’s spokesman Manuel Adorni asked him to build one for Trump, which usually takes six weeks, though he says he pulled together Musk’s machine in 20 days, burning Viva La Libertad Carajo! — Long Live Freedom Dammit! — into the saw’s aluminum with a laser.
Di Tella voted for Milei and supports his efforts to turn around Argentina’s economy after two decades of decline, but doesn’t identify as a libertarian, Peronist or any other political banner.
He doesn’t even attribute his own newfound stability to the president’s campaign to crush inflation. Di Tella says he’s enjoying better times because he picked up a second job to make ends meet, making $1,800 a month after his income dropped to as low as $400 during the pandemic.
“I’m an artist, not a politician. I’m an ordinary citizen who became fed up, angry and overwhelmed,” Di Tella said. During Milei’s campaign, “I saw him euphoric, rabid, genuinely fed up and I felt reflected. I loved it.”
Although Milei keeps Di Tella’s chainsaw in his office, the artist says he has never actually met the libertarian nor asked for a meeting in exchange for the hardware.
The president’s spokesman Adorni received the chainsaw from Di Tella that Musk wielded in Washington, and wrote to Di Tella about another order for Trump.
Di Tella thinks it’s more poetic that Milei doesn’t know him yet.
“I think it’s fantastic because what unites us are the machines,” Di Tella said. “I’m grateful to him for the emblem that he gives to my machine for the mission that he needs to accomplish.”
Di Tella is indeed enduring the harshest part of Milei’s chainsaw strategy along with the rest of society. His maintenance charges at his apartment building have multiplied to 140,000 pesos ($132) a month from 30,000 pesos as Milei cut generous subsidies for electricity and water that were long seen as unsustainable policies from his predecessors.
The single father doesn’t own a car, so he takes the bus to one job repairing mini-tractors and lawn mowers, he says. His other source of income is as a “brand ambassador” for an Argentine chainsaw brand.
Di Tella says he hasn’t received compensation for his custom-made chainsaws, and doesn’t want any either. Raw material costs for making one of the machines cost him about $500 in total, expenses that he typically covers by himself. “Money doesn’t have any power over my art,” he said.
Despite supporting Milei, Di Tella is worried the chainsaw could be associated with Argentines losing work after the government says it cut more than 40,000 state jobs.
“I’d like him to be a little more prudent, more balanced,” Di Tella says. “I wouldn’t like that, because of the chainsaw, there’s people who may have been left without a job and are living through hard times. I wouldn’t like that it hurts people, just that it fixes the things that are wrong.”
Di Tella himself knows hard times. Never married, he resigned in February 2020 from his job at a piano repair shop, before the previous government implemented a strict lockdown that March. Unemployed, he applied for Argentina’s cash checks program, but says he was denied and never received any welfare. His mom lives in the neighborhood and provided family savings for him and his son.
He first grew fond of the machines when he was 13 years old, cutting trees as a teenager in Argentina’s heavily wooded beach towns full of pines. Di Tella says movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — he keeps a figurine of the villain Leatherface in his apartment — also inspired him.
“When I saw that movie, I loved it, not for the murders, but the chainsaw itself — big, spectacular,” Di Tella said, adding he’s never had an accident or suffered injury from the machine. “The chainsaw is a symbol of change. It’s not violent, it’s change. That’s why the chainsaw is well made — to show that you have to change, that something isn’t going right.”
