Norberto Di Próspero

Norberto Di Próspero was born in 1965 in Caseros, in the Tres de Febrero district of Buenos Aires province, Argentina. On his own website he wrote that his childhood was shaped by his father, the railway worker and Peronist activist known as "el Colorado" Di Próspero, by his mother and by his maternal grandmother, who taught him the value of collective action. His father was a railway union delegate who worked alongside the Peronist politician Lorenzo Pepe, and the CGT later remembered Di Próspero as "the son of a railway worker and Peronist activist".

He said he became politically active during the military dictatorship under his father's guidance. By 1984 he was studying journalism and had passed the tests to work as a ticket seller at Caseros station, as his father hoped. Instead, when Lorenzo Pepe took charge of the Library of Congress, Di Próspero joined its staff and worked in the newspaper archive, helping historians. He later called the choice one of the best decisions of his life.

Di Próspero first joined the state workers' union ATE, then moved into the Asociación del Personal Legislativo (APL), which he said was at the time more of a mutual society than a union. He was elected a delegate in 1988. In 1989, when APL changed its statutes and created a secretariat for the interior, he won that post at the age of 24 with a group called the Agrupación Juan Domingo Perón. From the early 1990s he also served several terms as deputy secretary general under Ricardo Sablich.

His interior secretariat, which built ties with legislative workers in the provinces, became the seed of the Federation of Legislative Employees of the Argentine Republic (FELRA). He was its first secretary general and later its president, and had recently been re-elected to lead it until 2030.

In 2003 he left Sablich's group and founded the Arturo Jauretche group and the Lista Verde y Blanca. He won the APL election in July 2004, aged 39, and took office on 26 July 2004. He was re-elected in 2008, 2012, 2016, 2021 and August 2025, each time by a large majority; Clarín reported that he won 85.5 percent of the vote in 2025. APL had fewer than 8,000 members, but its place inside Congress kept him close to the centre of Argentine politics.

As secretary general he restored annual pay bargaining with the congressional authorities, defended Law 24,600 on the employment of congressional staff and the union's health insurance scheme, and expanded training, culture and human rights work. He said that he received 40 to 50 members a day. He was also secretary for legislative affairs of the CGT, a member of the Movimiento de Acción Sindical Argentino (MASA), which he formed with the taxi drivers' leader Omar Viviani, and a national councillor of the Justicialist Party.

Di Próspero described himself as a Peronist and was aligned with Kirchnerism. According to La Nación he was trained in union politics under the influence of the truckers' leader Hugo Moyano, but broke with him when Moyano split from Cristina Kirchner in 2011, and helped organise the CGT faction led by the metalworkers' leader Antonio Caló. He had close relations with Amado Boudou when Boudou presided over the Senate, and Boudou attended the opening of an APL union hotel in Villa Gesell. In 2013 he was part of one of the first union delegations to visit Pope Francis at Santa Marta.

Under the government of Alberto Fernández he was close to Sergio Massa, then president of the Chamber of Deputies, and supported the extension of virtual sessions during the pandemic. In 2023 he called on members to vote for the Unión por la Patria candidate.

Di Próspero wrote that he started a family in the years after he joined Congress. During the tributes in the Chamber of Deputies on 15 October 2026, the deputy Agustín Rossi and the former senator Miguel Pichetto both addressed his three daughters. Colleagues described him as a man of dialogue and of his word, and Rossi recalled sharing mate and coffee with him at the union headquarters only a week before his death.

Norberto Di Próspero died suddenly on Wednesday 14 October 2026, aged 61. APL confirmed his death that night in a statement from its executive committee and closed its offices for mourning on 15 and 16 October. The cause of death was not made public, and reports did not say where he died. A week earlier he had called elections for union delegates in Congress, due to be held on 15 October.

Tributes came from the CGT, the Justicialist Party, the Peronist bloc in the Senate and the Unión por la Patria bloc in the Chamber of Deputies, as well as from opposition legislators including Mónica Frade and Esteban Paulón. On 15 October the Chamber of Deputies held a minute's silence, and the former Chamber president Cecilia Moreau spoke of "a collective grief" among its workers. His body lay in the Salón Azul of the National Congress on Friday 16 October from noon to 6 pm, when legislative workers, union leaders, legislators and parliamentary authorities paid their respects.

Di Próspero led the union of Argentina's congressional workers for 22 years and was widely seen as an unavoidable interlocutor for the authorities of both chambers, whatever their politics. The CGT said that he had made collective action a way of life and that he defended wages and jobs and raised the standing of legislative work. The deputy Juan Grabois remembered him as an exceptional union leader who received every worker, one by one, with his door open each day. His legacy includes the national federation of legislative employees that grew out of his early work and the open door style of leadership his members credited him with.