Juan Carlos Blumberg (born in 1945) is an Argentine textile entrepreneur and victims' rights advocate who rose to prominence following the 2004 murder of his son, Axel Blumberg. Early life and tragedy Blumberg was born in Avellaneda, Buenos Aires, in a Jewish family of German and Lithuanian background. He enrolled at the National Technological University and pursued a degree in textile engineering, though he reportedly left in 1966 to pursue an interest in traditional Lithuanian dancing. Blumberg publicly referred to himself as an "engineer" graduate of Reutlingen University (Germany), although a journalistic investigation revealed on 15 June 2007 that this claim was false. Blumberg lost his son Axel Blumberg, an engineering student, after a kidnapping resulted in the latter's murder on March 22, 2004. Argentina was at the time in the midst of a wave of extortion kidnappings, often remaining unsolved after badly conducted investigations; in three cases since 2001, the extortive kidnappings ended in murder: Juan Manuel Canillas, who was killed by his kidnappers in July 2002, Diego Peralta, in August of the same year, and the aforementioned Axel Blumberg, in March 2004. A large portion of Argentine society viewed (and still views) the police forces as corrupt and inefficient, political leaders as non-supportive, and penal laws as excessively lenient; in this context, Axel Blumberg's murder caused an uproar and was the catalyst for massive demonstrations, protesting this perceived impunity and supporting Axel's father in his search for justice. The first such demonstration gathered more than 100,000 people. He was named Humanitarian of the Year by the LatinTrade magazine the same year for his campaign Crusade for Axel. Blumberg as a public figure Juan Carlos Blumberg claimed he wanted justice for his son's murderers, but even more importantly, a working system to ensure that such crimes stopped being common and that criminals were punished. He quickly became a model for victims' suffering families, and a media icon. The latter role brought upon him a large amount of media sentimentalism and sensationalism. Soon he also took a political stance, directly asking for legislators to harden crime laws he saw as sparing certain criminals from rightful punishment. Very soon, right-wing political and ideological leaders took advantage of Blumberg's denunciations to criticize the policies of the national and local governments. Encouraged by this, Blumberg demanded to be received by the legislative chamber of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, and upon being