Scandal at Blender: more than twenty workers were fired over salary claims

Host Fiorella Sargenti cut her program live to denounce mass layoffs after a collective salary claim. What followed was a powerful image and a silent channel. But the crisis also once again illuminated the figure of Augusto Marini, the missionary owner of Blender and Carajo, and that of a judicial operator from La Plata who presides over one of his companies: Enrique Saraví O’Keefe, a former Vidalista official who now manages the libertarian cultural battle.

Yesterday afternoon, during the broadcast of Último Aviso, Fiorella Sargenti stopped her program cold, looked at the camera and said what no one in the studio wanted to say: the company had fired a group of colleagues for making a claim related to their salaries. «There are guards waiting for us outside,» he added. Seconds later, the screen went black. The channel went silent. And what began as an internal labor conflict became, in a matter of hours, one of the most talked about topics in the Argentine digital ecosystem.

The claim was neither improvised nor excessive. The channel plant had sent a collective email asking that agreements already agreed upon before the start of the year be respected: the payment of holidays, the application of quarterly increases and the review of the situation of employees harmed by recent internal changes. They asked, in short, that what was promised be fulfilled. The management’s response was dismissal. According to channel sources, Marini would have fired around twenty people in a first decision.

The SiPreBA (Buenos Aires Press Union) immediately repudiated the measure and described it as anti-union. Gestures of solidarity came from other programs in the same environment. The host Marcos Aramburu took aim directly at the business leadership, which he called «useless», and closed with a phrase that well summarizes the current climate in that ecosystem: «Some ‘new’ media are very similar to the old ones.» The workers’ position, meanwhile, is for now inflexible: they demand the immediate reinstatement of all those dismissed.

Augusto Marini, the missionary businessman who bought all of Blender in 2025 and took control of the channel, which from that moment on began a slow decline until the crisis that broke out on Thursday. Marini also owns Carajo, the signal associated with the libertarian cultural battle. He is one step away from managing the City Canal, after presenting an offer that exceeded the rival proposal by 35 million pesos, guaranteeing a monthly fee of 50 million. This media expansion advances in parallel with its state businesses: just a month ago, the Libertarian government awarded it a direct contract for almost four million dollars for the repair of trains.

The paradox is quite evident: a businessman who finances the «freedom» channel and at the same time accumulates contracts with the State and is close to taking over a public channel. It is difficult not to wonder if the anti-caste discourse reaches the administration of own resources.

And this is where the information that this medium already reported comes in. Enrique Saraví O’Keefe, known as «Mequi» in his circle, is today president of Carajo SA. His career does not come from journalism or content production: he was an official in the Buenos Aires Ministry of Justice during the administration of María Eugenia Vidal, with close ties to the then minister Gustavo Ferrari, and he also had a stint at the La Plata Bar Association, where he held a position as secretary. From that place he built a capital of relationships that seems to have been the key to his leap into political streaming.

The Blender case, then, exceeds the discussion about salaries. It exposes the plot of an ecosystem that is presented as horizontal and disruptive, but that behind closed doors reproduces much more traditional business logic. And Tomás Rebord’s defense unintentionally revealed it. The driver of There is something there revealed that Blender fired the entire production of his program while he was physically out of the country, that he tried to communicate throughout the day with the channel’s authorities without receiving a response, and that he ended up interpreting the measure as «a super attack» on him and his team. Given the lack of responses, he announced the reactivation of hagov.ar, the subscription platform he used before, this time with a different objective: to provide financial support to colleagues who were left without work. It’s hard not to wonder what difference there is between a «new» media outlet that fires twenty people for an email and one of the old ones that always presented itself as the problem.

How many of the operators who built Buenos Aires judicial policy in the last decade ended up, without making too much noise, managing the media that today shapes the political debate? For more context on who Saraví O’Keefe is and how she got here, The full note is at Vivelaplata.com.ar.