‘The streets are ours, Milei’

On 12 March, pensioners surrounded the Congress building in Buenos Aires to protest at pension reform and hikes in medicine prices. President Javier Milei’s government responded with force, using hidden arms caches, agents without IDs and mobile van units parked at strategic points with their doors open. Football fans, including historic rivals like Boca Juniors and River Plate, hit the streets to protect the pensioners, giving the police a run for their money. There were 114 arrests, all later released for lack of evidence. Patricia Bullrich, Milei’s security minister, is trying to introduce legislation to criminalise football fans.

A photographer, Pablo Grillo, was hit in the eye with a tear gas cannister and almost killed (he needed brain surgery). Bullrich accused Beatriz Blanco, 81, of clubbing a policeman a dozen times, but the opposite was true. Blanco said she would be out in the streets again on Wednesday 19 March, when Argentina’s trade union confederation, the CGT, and other social and political movements marched in solidarity with pensioners. She is pursuing legal action against Bullrich for her injuries.

On stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland in February, Milei had handed Elon Musk a chainsaw with ‘Long Live Freedom, Dammit!’ inscribed on it: DOGE comes out of Milei’s playbook as much as Musk’s own.

When torrential rains brought floods and destruction to Bahía Blanca on 7 March, leaving sixteen people dead and many missing, Milei didn’t visit until five days afterwards. Only the state can respond to the scale of such disasters, which conflicts with his fundamentalist faith in ‘free markets’.

On 17 March, a class action lawsuit was filed with the New York State Supreme Court, naming Milei for his role in promoting and legitimising the $LIBRA cryptocurrency scam (though not as a defendant). The Argentinian Chamber of Deputies approved an investigating commission into Milei, his sister Karina – who ran his campaign and whom he calls ‘la jefa’ – and other officials evolved in the con.

Milei’s popularity and legitimacy have been significantly eroded since he came to power in 2023, as pessimism over the economy has increased, with 37 per cent of Argentinians expecting things to get worse in the coming year. Inflation, at 67 per cent annually, is among the highest in the world – with food prices skyrocketing. In January twice as many Argentinians visited Brazil as in the same month last year, while tourism in Argentina has dried up. Unwilling to devalue the peso, Milei is asking the IMF for a loan.

Without an influx of dollars, devaluation on the order of 50 per cent would be unavoidable, along with a consequent price spiral. But Argentina’s relations with the IMF have been rocky since the popular uprising and bank run of 2001. In 2018, President Mauricio Macri negotiated a $44 billion loan; voters ejected him from the Casa Rosada the following year. Emergency cash from the IMF is unlikely to improve Milei’s political fortunes.

For its part, the IMF has doubts about the government’s ability both to contain popular mobilisation and to pay back any eventual loan package. Milei has been draining foreign currency reserves to try to keep the exchange rate stable.

Bullrich is offering ten million pesos in reward money to anyone who provides ‘useful information’ on the football fans who protested on 12 March. The fear of popular uprising has motivated judicial, political and business elites to make contingency plans. Milei’s lawyers have prepared a ‘state of siege’ decree, and the president even cancelled a trip to Israel. (Though he’s going to see Trump in Florida this week.)

On 19 March, signs on screens and loudspeaker announcements in the subway made threats to protesters in the hope of turning them back; the effort failed. Congress was completely blocked off, with major police deployments in the city centre and along arterial roads. Deputies debated the agreement with the IMF, approving it in the late afternoon by 129-108 (with six abstentions).

Sources close to the economy minister, Luis ‘Toto’ Caputo, say they don’t know how much the package will be, how much will go towards refinancing or paying back debt, or whether, and under what conditions, the loan can be used to intervene in the exchange rate. Milei and Caputo hold few cards if repression fails.

As in the US, at stake is the constitutional right to peaceful protest. At checkpoints in the subway and around Congress, police demanded to see ID and rifled through bags and backpacks, like the NYPD, making no distinction between passersby and protesters.

The Public Employees’ Union gathered at noon. Within a few hours, reinforcements had arrived from the Workers’ Pole, the Organisations in Struggle Front, Neighbourhoods on Foot, the Evita Movement, the Darío Santillán Popular Front, the Union of Workers in the Popular Economy, the Combative Class Current, the Brotherhood, the Revolutionary Communist Youth, the Peronist University Youth, the Socialist Workers’ Movement, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the United Maritime Workers, the Tow Truck and Winch Operators’ Union, the Transport Workers Union, the Press Workers’ Union and the Glassworkers’ Union.

As Milei celebrated congressional approval of the IMF package in the Casa Rosada, a crescendo of songs, chants, trumpets, cymbals, drums and fireworks came from the growing crowd in the plaza in front of Congress, sectioned off into three parts by police. One banner said: ‘Stealing from pensioners is a social crime.’ In an improvised Plenary Session of Retired Workers, pensioners called on Bullrich to resign, and on the CGT to authorise a general strike: it will take place on 10 April. Nora Biaggio, a retired schoolteacher, declared the event a ‘major victory’: ‘The streets are ours, Milei – we took them from you.’

Eduardo de la Serna, a priest from the Option for the Poor movement, said: ‘Ten years ago I could never have imagined anyone at high levels of political power in the US government making a Nazi salute. At some point the axis shifted as a whole, and what seemed to be a social consensus yesterday, today we must fight so that there’s a minimum of humanity.’

The police refrained from the violence of the previous week. As the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo put it, ‘Freedom and revolution are words that belong to us.’ On 24 March, the 49th anniversary of General Videla’s coup, more than 100,000 people marched to the Plaza de Mayo in defence of historical memory, truth and justice, led by the Madres y Abuelas. There was no massive police deployment. In the words of Taty Almeida, of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora: ‘We have the force of our people’s history.’ Argentinians are showing others who wish to resist the advance of far right governments – in Latin America, the US or Europe – how it can be done.