Tag: Javier Milei

Workers mount massive general strike against right-wing Argentine government / by Morning Star

A few public buses drive through empty streets near the Retiro train station during a general strike against the reforms of President Javier Milei in Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 9, 2024. | AP

Reposted from the Moning Star: The People’s Daily (UK)

Argentina’s biggest trade unions mounted one of their fiercest challenges to the free-market fundamentalist government of President Javier Milei today with a mass general strike.

The walkouts led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights and halted key bus, rail and subway lines. Main avenues and streets, as well as major transportation terminals, were left eerily empty.

The 24-hour strike against Milei’s contentious austerity and deregulation agenda threatened to bring the nation of 46 million to a standstill as banks, businesses and state agencies closed in protest.

Most teachers couldn’t make it to school and parents kept their kids at home. Rubbish collectors walked off the job, as did health workers, other than in A&Es.

The government said transport service disruptions would prevent 6.6 million people from making it to work. That was apparent during morning rush-hour today as few cars could be seen on streets typically snarled with traffic. Rubbish was already piling up on deserted pavements.

CGT, the country’s largest union federation, said it was staging the strike alongside other labour syndicates “in defence of democracy, labour rights and a living wage.”

Argentina’s powerful unions — backed by left-leaning Peronist parties that have dominated national politics for decades — have led the pushback Milei’s policies on the streets and in courts over recent months.

“We are facing a government that promotes the elimination of labor and social rights,” the unions said.

The government downplayed the disruption as a cynical ploy by its left-wing political opponents.

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Moning Star: The People’s Daily (UK)

Without struggle, there is no victory / by Al Mayadeen

João Pedro Stedile, national leader of the MST. Photo: ALBA-TCP

Al Mayadeen spoke to national leader of the MST, João Pedro Stédile, about the situation of the left in Brazil and the need for a global front in defense of just causes and in the struggle against imperialism

Reposted from Peoples Dispatch

The Latin American left is not in a position to face the capitalist crisis and is in debt in the sense of discovering new forms of struggle to propose structural changes in the masses, assured the leader of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) of Brazil, João Pedro Stédile.

In an interview with the pan-Arab channel Al Mayadeen, the economist and popular leader, addressed the scenario of the left in Brazil, the need for international coordination in defense of just causes and in the struggle against imperialism.

The social defender insisted on the urgency of unity of the entire world working class to confront capitalist globalization and the presence of transnational companies.

A faithful follower of the left-wing revolutionary processes in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and of south-south cooperation, Stédile also addressed the internal scenario of Brazil, the management of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and support for the cause of the Palestinian people.

Al Mayadeen: How do you assess the position of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the Brazilian left on the political scene in America and internationally?

João Pedro Stédile: Lula faced heavy persecution in the past. They put him in jail, they prevented him from running for office, but we managed to get him out of jail, and our movement played an important role, because we staged a vigil for 580 days, camped in front of the jail.

And after he was released, conditions were created in Brazil to generate a broad front that managed to defeat fascism and elect him president. And for that, Lula was very important, because he was the only candidate who had enough strength to defeat the extreme right, and we still only won by two points.

But it turns out that it was also a broad front government, with many forces of the bourgeoisie, of the right, and progressive left forces. So, that is Lula’s Government, of class composition.

On the other hand, the Government assumed a completely dilapidated State, because modern fascists want the minimum State, they are not interested in a strong state, because their entire policy is to favor transnational companies. Those were the companies that financed the coup against Dilma Rousseff and later imposed the Government of Jair Bolsonaro. Just as it was the American, Israeli companies and the Mossad, who put Javier Milei in Argentina.

So, that is the nature of the Lula Government, you can’t expect much. Furthermore, in these coalitions, the capitalist crisis continues and also affects Brazil, and the Lula Government of that nature fails to have a project for the country, a program that can point to the future.

The policies that Lula is promoting in this year and a half are still insufficient and do not lift workers out of poverty, they do not combat social inequality, and that is why we continue with 30 million Brazilians going hungry and another 70 million who do not have work, stable income, or labor rights.

So, the situation in Brazil is very difficult.

In Brazil, we all know that President Lula never assumed himself to be a man of the left in the sense of being anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist, he is a humanist and a trade unionist.

Of course, he has a social sensitivity of wanting to help the poor, but it is not enough to love, you have to create conditions, accumulate strength and, above all, motivate people to organize to fight.

Now, on our side, on the left in Brazil, we have a very complex situation. The institutional left that is in parties and even participates in Lula’s Government, are held hostage by electoral logic, they only put their energy into electing deputies, for that institutional life.

The leftist parties in Brazil stopped putting energy, resources, the political will to organize the working class and the social struggle, and those who continue to do so are the popular and union movements, which are part of the left in the generic sense, but they are not the main political forces in the country.

And here the main challenge is that as we suffered a very big defeat with the advent of the crisis of capitalism in 2014, then Lula’s prison, the coup against Dilma, the rise of Bolsonaro, the COVID-19 genocide, which took the lives of almost a million Brazilians; All of this affected the working class.

Today we are in a historical period of decline in the mass movement, and that has an impact, because when the masses do not fight, there is no change in the correlation of forces. Our position as a movement, more than anything, is to put energy into organizing people and social struggle, so that this is like a permanent process of accumulation of forces.

So, our position as a movement, more than anything, is to put energy into organizing the people, into organizing the social struggle, so that this is like a permanent process of accumulation of forces, which in the medium term results in the resurgence of the movement more, which is the only thing that can discuss a country project, pull the Government to the left and in fact, accelerate the processes of changes that lead to the improvement of the living conditions of the people.

AM: What is the state of the working class in Brazil?

JPS: In Brazil we have, of the total population, 140 million workers, half of them have a job, are minimally organized in unions or in some way, at least they have labor rights. But, there are another 70 million who are on the streets, who are abandoned, who do not have a stable job, who do not have a fixed income, and that part is abandoned even by the left. We don’t know how to organize them, the only thing we know is that they live on the outskirts of the city, that the majority are young, that the majority are women, that the majority are Black, and that they suffer all types of repression from the State.

Of course, we have a very large deficit, the sector of the people that are organized and have class consciousness is very small. For example, even of the 70 million who have jobs and are formalized, only nine percent are unionized, so this generates a low level of critical consciousness and, therefore, a low level of political participation.

AM: What is the state of the left in Latin America?

JPS: To understand the situation in Latin America, we must take a slightly broader, historical look. When there was the crisis in the Soviet Union and the rise of financial capital that globalized and imposed neoliberalism on us in the 90s, a complete dispersion of the left and the living conditions of the working class was generated. We lost 10-15 years there, where we were under permanent defeat.

Neoliberalism did not solve the problems of the people, of the working class, and the problems exacerbated the contradictions. That then made it possible that, at the beginning of the year 2000 with the victory of Commander Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, we managed to win the elections in several countries, but in the majority of the countries that won progressive governments, they were not the result of a rise of the movement of masses, it was much more a reaction against neoliberalism.

From 2000 to 2014 there was a great ideological confrontation in Latin America and that generated a struggle that appeared in the governments and on the left around three projects. The neoliberal project continued to be subordinated to the American empire, where there were some countries with their governments and the left dominated.

Then, there was another sector that was progressive and against neoliberalism, therefore, they were in favor of strengthening the State, but they were not anti-imperialists. And in that period, the countries that stood out with that line were Argentina and Brazil.

And there was a third project, which was the project that Chávez promoted and that, in order to contrast the project of imperialism, of neoliberalism, the FTAA, he named ALBA, and around the ALBA project, with the leadership of Chávez from Venezuela, not only the progressive Government of Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba joined, but a great alliance of popular movements was generated, which we even called ALBA Movimientos, which was a way not only to adhere to the ALBA project, but to engage in struggle against the other two.

ALBA was an anti-imperialist project, a project of people’s integration and not just of governments. And also, it was positive that at that time the conditions were generated to produce other platforms of continental integration promoted by Chávez, such as CELAC, which is very important as an institutional platform to oppose the OAS. And also, at the South American level, there was a push for UNASUR as an economic space.

With the capitalist crisis since 2014, with the Venezuelan oil crisis, with the death of Chávez and other difficulties that arose, Latin America, from 2014 until now, is immersed in a crisis, in which none of the three projects constitute a real proposal.

Not even American neoliberalism is a solution to the problems. Neoliberalism now no longer even continues as a project, because the transnationals, faced with the crisis of capitalism, appealed to the fascists of the extreme right, which were not present in the previous period.

The neo-developmental, progressive project, which was Argentina, Chile and Brazil, also entered into crisis. Hence, what I explained before, any change in Lula’s government is very difficult. So, the same project that wants to be anti-neoliberal, but does not want to be anti-imperialist, is in crisis. Perhaps Mexico still maintains a certain viability as a project.

The ALBA project also, unfortunately, entered into crisis, because the countries do not have resources, because it did not manage to expand its political base and the same four or five original countries remained and only the Caribbean islands were added, which make up 10 countries, but in Latin America we are 34.

The ALBA Project is also in a period of decline, and all this analysis that I am doing leads us to read the reality, that since there is no economic solution and there is no clear economic project, neither for the bourgeoisie subordinated to the gringos, nor for the working class, what we know is that Latin America will continue, perhaps for 10, 15 years, with a historical period of great political instability, where anything can happen in the space of governments. And that is why sometimes a progressive government is elected, and since it does not make policies in favor of the people, then the extreme right comes, like what happened in Brazil, like what happened in Argentina, like what happened in Peru, like what happened in Ecuador.

The scenario of the left in Latin America follows more or less the same pattern as Brazil. The Latin American left is very weak in terms of a program to confront the capitalist crisis, because now is the time to present an anti-capitalist program. The title does not matter, if it is socialism, if it is popular…, but it has to be anti-capitalist, capitalism is not going to solve the problem of the masses.

The left in Latin America, with rare exceptions of some parties, I say left as a popular force that organizes itself in various ways, is indebted to building a program that faces the capitalist crisis, that proposes structural changes for the masses.

The left has the debt, the task to discover new forms of struggle, new forms of people’s organization, especially in those two sectors that I referred to before, the workers of the periphery and the youth. It is still very trapped in the institutionality, with the elections, and it may take a while until the mass mobilization also moves the left and then a new generation of leftists emerges, of fighters, with other practices, another vision of the world and a new soul.

AM: What role do the elite of intellectuals, journalists, thinkers, philosophers, politicians and leaders play in this scenario of left-wing crisis?

JPS: The problem of intellectuals in Latin America, generally, in generic terms, is that this sector, which in reality are petty bourgeois who live around the university, around the media or institutions, were co-opted by neoliberalism, not as an ideology, as a project, but because of customs.

The guys became very individualistic, they only think about their careers, very consumerist and they abandoned social political practice. But it is true, there are many brave intellectuals who remain organic and, therefore, reflect from leftist organizations and the working class in general, but they are a minority. Much worse than in some other times when there was a more important presence of organic intellectuals. Today we almost do not have organic intellectuals, we have intellectuals.

AM: In the midst of Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip and demands for a Palestinian state. How is the Palestinian cause seen in Brazil?

JPS: We were formed ideologically by the influence of the Cuban Revolution, its leaders, its thinkers, by the influence of the Nicaraguan Revolution, which was in 1979 and greatly influenced the struggle of all of Latin America. Also at that time there was an ideological influence of liberation theology, which is that Christian aspect that linked the belief, the faith that peasants have through their religious practice, like any people, with the need for liberation.

And that was important, and those currents that I am citing, whether from classical thinkers, whether from leaders like Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, or from revolutionary processes like Cuba and Nicaragua, helped us incorporate, from the birth of the movement, the conception of that it is not possible to fight against capitalism, against large estates, against patriarchy, against colonialism, without internationalism.

Internationalism for us is a principle, it is not only the motivation to show solidarity with the people who fight, it is more than that, it is an identity. The entire working class in the world is the same, we only change the passport, our enemies are the same: capitalism.

In times of the globalization of capital, which comes through the dollar, through transnational companies, through financial capital, the working class around the world will not be able to free itself if we do not join forces to confront the same enemy.

Since the beginning of the movement we have that identity with Palestine, with the people of Palestine, because they are in the first trench against Zionist colonialism, against capitalist exploitation, and because in a certain way you fight for the land, for your territory, the Palestinians are the landless of the Middle East, and we in Brazil, who are landless, are the Palestinians of Brazil, because the situation is the same.

We fight for territory, for rights, for popular autonomy, so we always had that sympathy for the struggle of the Palestinian people, and we always, in some way, tried to connect, which is more than support and solidarity.

As MST, we always pressured so that the two organizations that exist in Palestine that involve people from the countryside, whether women or peasants, participate in La Via Campesina, which is our international platform.

We always motivate our base to participate in brigades to harvest olives in the month of October in Palestine. So, we had to campaign because the ticket was expensive, but we have managed to send 20-30 people every two years.

That is a lesson for us. It is not going to harvest olives, it is going to see how the Government of “Israel” behaves, it is going and seeing what the daily struggle of the Palestinians for their resistance is like, and when they return, they are another person, as if they had done a great course of political and personal training and commitment to the Palestinian people.

That is why every time the situation in Palestine intensidies, we try to do something that can symbolize or can be a testimony of our fidelity, our loyalty, our solidarity with the Palestinian people.

But that’s how it is with all people. Now we are very worried and we say: Our Palestine, our Gaza, is Haiti, because the same barbarism that they are imposing in Gaza, they are imposing in Haiti.

Just as we try to denounce in Brazil the repressive hand of the Government of “Israel”, because they continue to sell weapons, above all, weapons of mass repression, which they test against the Palestinians and then take to the periphery of Brazil to shoot at the poor.

There are several weapons there that were sold [to Brazil] by the Israelis, just as it was public and notorious that Mossad and the intelligence services of “Israel” were supporting Bolsonaro from the beginning. It was Mossad who lent Bolsonaro large computers installed in Taiwan or Ireland, from there to use social media without control, and they carried out a true massacre on the unconscious people of Brazil, and managed to win the elections.

They repeated that same tactic now with Milei, clearly linked to Zionism and supported by Mossad. And the same thing happens in other Latin American countries, such as Guatemala, where the Israelis always had a lot of presence underground.

So, we try to use the negative facts of the invisible hand of Mossad and Zionist capital, to show our people that the struggle is international.

AM: What message do you have for the people of Gaza and all the people in Palestine who struggle against zionism?

JPS: Our message, which is not mine, it is from the MST, and we do it in practice, not just in rhetoric, is to tell them that we are with them and that they resist. We know that this costs a lot, many lives, a lot of sacrifice, but there is no other way. Try to resist, and we, from Brazil, what we can do is join in, be it sending food, or doing counter propaganda against zionism. The best way to be in solidarity with the resistance is also to fight in our towns against the companies of “Israel”, against Israeli capital.

For example, in Brazil, the largest company that sells beer is owned by Zionist capital, which is controlled by Banco Safra, which is Zionist. So, we must fight against those Zionist companies that also exploit the Brazilian people.

Comrades, comrades, resist, only one thing is certain, some time may pass, a month, two years, 10 years, but the victory is certain. He who does not fight does not win, and your right and dignity is the security that you will win, and with you all the people who fight will win.

This article was first published in Spanish at Al Mayadeen.

João Pedro Stedile is a social activist in the struggle for agrarian reform, for a new model of agricultural production in Brazil, Latin America and the world. He is one of the founding members of the Global University for Sustainability, and is a national leader of MST and La Via Campesina International.

Reactionaries and US Military Backers Prevail in Latin America – for Now / By W. T. Whitney

The commander of U.S. Southern Command, Army Gen. Laura Richardson, and Argentine Armed Forces Joint Command Chief Lt. Gen. Juan Martín Paleo, arrive at the Argentine Ministry of Defense. During her visit April 25-27, Richardson met with leaders, including Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Richardson is a repeat visitor to Argentina since the election of right-wing President Milei. | Photo via U.S. Embassy Argentina

South Paris, Maine

U.S. Southern Command Chief Laura Richardson was visiting Argentina for the third time. On April 4 in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego – the world’s southernmost city – she and U. S. Ambassador Marc Stanley were received by President Javier Milei, his chief-of-staff, his cabinet chief, the defense minister, the interior minister, a military band, and an honor guard – at midnight.

Richardson announced her government would build an “integrated naval base” in Ushuaia that, close to the Strait of Magellan, looks to Antarctica. Both are strategically important. She “warned about China’s intention to build a multi-purpose port in Rio Grande, [Tierra del Fuego’s capitol city].”

Richardson, the U.S. military’s top leader for the region, had previously noted its attractions. She explained to the House Armed Services Committee in 2022 that Latin American and Caribbean area “accounts for $740 billion in annual trade with the U.S.; contains 60% of the world’s lithium and 31% of the world’s fresh water; has the world’s largest oil reserves” She insisted later that, “This region matters. It has a lot to do with national security, and we have to step up our game.”  

Testifying before a congressional committee on March 14, she remarked that, “The PRC (People’s Republic of China) is America’s pacing threat; countering their aggression and malign influence requires a whole-of-society approach.”

Information from an alleged leak from the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia suggests the U.S. government seeks to isolate non-aligned countries like Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela and collaborate with “three bastions of U.S. support,” namely Peru, Ecuador and Argentina.

Analyst Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein claims U.S. “policies [in the region] are in the hands of the Pentagon … with the  State Department playing a secondary role…. The emphasis is on penetrating extreme rightwing governments.” 

U.S. troops and military advisors collaborate with regional military forces to confront narco-trafficking and other transnational crimes. Stories of good works have propaganda use in gaining support for their presence and for partnership with governments pushing back against popular protests. The survey below shows that U.S. military activities in the region are far-reaching and that long-term objectives and short-term needs are served.

Moving parts

The stated mission of the U.S. military installation in Argentina’s Neuquén province is to respond to humanitarian crises. That a Chinese satellite launch and tracking facility is nearby is no coincidence. The area has immense oil deposits.

U.S. troops based in Misiones, near Argentina’s borders with Brazil and Uruguay, ostensibly deals with narco-trafficking and other cross-border crimes. The U.S. government recently provided credit for Argentina to buy 24 F-16 fighter planes from Denmark.  

The largest U.S. bases in the region are the Guantanamo base in Cuba, with 6100 military and civilian personnel, and the one at Soto Cano in Honduras, with 500 U.S. troops and 500 civilian employees.TheU.S. Naval Medical Research Unit, active in several locations in Peru and overseen by the Southern Command, conducts “health science research” with Peruvian partners. It also serves to “build the capacity of special forces to survive in tropical forests.”

The U.S. Navy patrols South Atlantic waters and conducts joint training exercises with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay. The U.S. Coast Guard confronts illegal – read Chinese – fishing off South America’s Pacific coast.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers operates in 17 countries, fulltime in eight of them. It advises on river and estuary projects, notably on maintaining commercial flow from the Río de la Platabasin to the Atlantic.  

Ecuador and Peru each agreed recently to accept U.S. troop deployments. Colombia (2009) enabled the U.S. Air Force to utilize seven of its bases. Brazil and the United States (2019) cooperate in launching rockets, spacecraft, and satellites at Brazil’s Alcántara space center. The U.S. military cooperates with Brazil and Chile in conducting defense-related research.

The Southern Command annually holds CENTAM exercises with participation by U.S. National Guard troops and those of several Central American nations. They prepare for humanitarian crises and natural disasters.  The National Guards of 18 U.S. states carry out joint training exercises with the troops of 24 Latin American nations.

The United States supplies 94.9% of Argentina’s weapons, 93.4% of Colombia’s, 90.7% of México’s, and 82.7% of Brazil’s. Bolivia is the outlier, obtaining 66.2 % of its weapons from China.

The U.S. government authorized arms sales to Mexico in 2018 worth $1.3 million, to Argentina in 2022 worth $73 million, to Chile in 2020 worth $634 million, and to Brazil in 2022 worth $4 million.

The Southern Command operates schools for the region’s military and police forces. The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation and the School of the Americas, its predecessor from 1946 on, account for almost 100,000 military graduates. The El Salvador-based International Law Enforcement Academy, “purposed to combat transnational crime,” trains police and other security personnel.

The Command in December 2023 undertook joint aerial training exercises with Guyana, where Exxon Mobil is preparing to extract offshore oil from huge deposits in Guyana’s Essequibo province.  Venezuela claims ownership of that area. Venezuelan President Maduro recently accused the U.S. government of establishing secret bases there.  

The story here is of installations and institutions, supply and support systems, and military interrelationships. The complexity of this U.S. undertaking signals fragility. The make-up of allied governments does likewise.

With friends like these

Raised in the United States and buoyed by his family’s great wealth, Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa is inexperienced. The country faces environmental catastrophe and widespread violence. Indigenous peoples are politically mobilized and security forces cruelly repressive.

Raiding the residence of unelected Peruvian President Dina Boluarte, police on March 29 found jewelry worth $502,700. Establishment politicians appointed her as president after they railroaded progressive President Pedro Castillo, her predecessor, to prison.  Oligarchic rule and occasional dictatorships are customary in Peru, as is indigenous resistance.

Presidential rule in Argentina is bizarre. Eric Calcagno, distinguished sociologist, journalist, and diplomat, told an interviewer recently that President Milei is “asking to be part of NATO, which is the organization that occupied part of our territory, the Malvinas (Falkland Islands).” For Milei, “war is necessary.” The “regime … [is] “the figurehead of local and international monopolies [and] is taking Argentina to the point of no return.”

Argentina is “governed by a gentleman who decides things in consultation with a dead dog, or much worse, with General Richardson of the Southern Command.”  (A news report attributes to Milei devices “allowing him to enter into the spirit of Conan and calm his anxiety.” Conan, a dog, is dead.)

Meanwhile, 800,000 students, workers, unionists, the unemployed, and popular assemblies marched in Buenos Aires on April 23. Joined by 200,000 Argentinians demonstrating elsewhere in the country, they were protesting governmental attacks on public universities.

With popular resistance continuing in Argentina and elsewhere in the region, the precariousness of U.S. military intervention will show. Investigator Jason Hickel points to “imperial arrangement on which Western capitalism has always relied (cheap labor, cheap resources, control over productive capacities, markets on tap).”

He refers to the “Western ruling classes” and the “violence they perpetrate, the instability, the constant wars against a long historical procession of peoples and movements in the global South.” And yet: “[a]fter political decolonization, a wide range of movements and states across the South … sought economic liberation and sovereign industrial development.”

These are national liberation struggles that presumably will continue. Resistance under that banner may someday overwhelm military intrusions like the ones surveyed here.   

W.T. Whitney is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.

In Argentina, Javier Milei’s Shock Therapy Is Wreaking Havoc / by Pablo Calvi

President of Argentina Javier Milei delivers a special speech during the 2024 edition of IEFA Latam Forum at Four Seasons Hotel Buenos Aires on March 26, 2024 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. (Tomas Cuesta / Getty Images)

Four months into his term, Argentina’s “anarcho-capitalist” president Javier Milei has drastically slashed public spending and sought to suppress wages. It’s a disaster for the country’s working class and its public institutions of research and learning.

Reposted from Jacobin

The week Argentine president Javier Milei reached the one-hundred-days-in-office mark was nothing short of catastrophic. Argentina was hit by two megastorms, one on March 11 and a second on March 20, both unleashing violent winds, egg-sized hail, and inches of rain, damaging factories, houses, and road signs. The storms left thirteen dead and wrought economic losses to the tune of hundreds of millions of US dollars.

Meanwhile, an ongoing epidemic of dengue fever had claimed seventy-nine lives and left 120,000 infected. And a wave of narco-violence swept through Rosario, the third-largest city in the country, after the drug cartels declared war on the mayor with a deadly shooting rampage that targeted bus drivers, pedestrians, and a parking garage attendant.

“We are missing the locust and the frogs, and we’ll soon reach the ten plagues,” Martin, a friend in Buenos Aires, joked after a couple beers. We were both standing in the kitchen late one night toward the end of March and, for a moment, his eyes turned somber. “I am going to be ok, and they are going to be ok,” he reassured me, looking at his fifteen-year-old son, who had stayed up late with us. “We have a home, and I have an income. I don’t know whether I will still be employed at the end of this month, though. But that is a different story.”

Martin is a law clerk who has worked with the same judge for over twenty years; he earned a law degree from the University of Buenos Aires and is the main breadwinner for a family of four. The radically neoliberal Milei government’s recent economic measures, which include drastic cuts to federal spending and government employment, have him and many others worried.

“I think that what [the government is doing] is a disaster,” Luis Alberto Beccaria, renowned economist and a professor at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, said. “The policies it is implementing are having a devastating impact on the most vulnerable parts of the population.” Beccaria, who has extensive experience directing the INDEC (the National Institute for Statistics and Census) and researching wages and employment, explained that Argentina’s inflation, a historical challenge, has slowed but remains in the double digits — 25 percent in December, 20 percent in January, and 13 percent in February.

But now inflation is occurring not only in Argentine pesos, but also in US dollars, which is proof to Beccaria that that Milei’s strategy of reducing the deficit through wage suppression is like “kicking the can down the road.” “Between January and February 2024, real wages have dropped around 17 percent,” he added.

In an interview on April 8, Milei referenced Jumbot, a Twitter account claiming to track online prices from the Jumbo supermarket chain, to boast about an alleged steep drop in consumer prices for March. But the Jumbot account revealed itself to be a hoax that same day.

“This account is a social experiment,” read a Jumbot tweet on April 8. “[We] never analyzed prices, nor was there a bot that tracked Jumbo’s products. But [this experiment] did serve one purpose: to show the need that many have to tout the results that reality denies them.” Luis Caputo, Milei’s economy minister, had also referenced the fake bot a week prior.

In the meantime, the actual data shows that prices keep going up in Argentina, which has led to a sharp decline in the purchasing power of wages and pensions. All this could push the country deeper into a social crisis.

Milei’s Austerity Program

Reducing government employment and public spending in 2024 Argentina — Milei’s stated goal — is a delicate matter. One in every two workers is either informal (employed outside of government oversight) or temporary, with contracts that are often at will or that only last for a year. This leaves half of the workforce in a vulnerable position, without access to unemployment benefits or any type of protection in case of layoffs.

Gustavo De Santis is a carpenter and set builder. He works for the Cervantes Theatre, the national stage and comedy theater, building backdrops and props for plays and performances. Yet for some time now, he’s been driving a cab, which is currently his main source of income. “I used to have a lot of work building stages for plays, then I worked for soap operas on TV,” he reminisced. “Now, all that has stopped, and the requests I get for carpentry jobs are dismal.”

De Santis believes that the Argentine president governs for the rich. “Nobody has money, and people are losing the little hope they had, if they had any,” he lamented.

The government’s rabid austerity is drawing criticism from many quarters. “This government doesn’t have an income policy,” House representative Nicolás Massot told me during a phone conversation. “It is allowing the markets to set exchange rates and utility rates but have frozen wage negotiations.” Once a member of PRO, the right-wing coalition founded by former president Mauricio Macri, Massot emphasized the inconsistency of a government that claims to be liberal yet fixes salaries and halts “paritarias” (the periodic negotiations of wages between unions and employers).

“In an economy with normal formal structures [unlike Argentina’s], income policies are primarily wage policies, bargained by strong unions,” Massot explained. “Argentina, with its large informal sector [including scrap collectors, recyclers, and day laborers], should consider in its income policies not only salaries but also informal wages, pensions, and social assistance — all of these items that will keep on losing against inflation.” Despite supporting some government initiatives to lower public spending, Massot has criticized Milei and his economy minister, Luis Caputo, for what he sees as their neglect of retirees and informal workers.

Since Milei took office over three months ago, public institutions such as the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), along with other national universities and research institutions like CONICET (the national commission for scientific and technological research, akin to NASA in the United States), have been in the government’s crosshairs as part of its assault on public spending.

“The president has not approved the new budget, and we are operating with the same funds approved for 2022, despite accumulated inflation of 200 percent over two years,” explained philosopher and professor Federico Penelas. “There have been layoffs, and there’s a looming threat of even more, but what’s impacting us the most is the lack of funds to cover operating costs.”

Penelas, researcher and a member of the Executive Committee for the College of Philosophy and Literature, is very concerned about the cuts. “CONICET’s research and doctoral grants were slashed in two, from 1,300 [grants] to six hundred.” The hardest-hit areas are in STEM fields. “Labs and new technologies are costly to maintain,” he pointed out.

On March 15, Penelas published an op-ed in Página 12, an influential left-leaning newspaper in Buenos Aires, warning that Argentina’s public sector is now fully experiencing Milei’s anarcho-capitalist revolution. “It is not a matter of whether the government has money or not,” he wrote. “What matters is that Milei believes it shouldn’t have any.”

Attacks on the University

As soon as the rain gave Buenos Aires a break in mid-March, I visited UBA’s Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, where I studied for five years. The school sits in the massive, refurbished building of an old tobacco processing factory, nestled in the lush neighborhood of Caballito. The school year hadn’t started yet, so the hallways were unusually quiet, with only a few dozen people walking up the concrete staircase that leads to the first floor. The walls, however, were still as I remembered them, emblazoned with red banners handwritten in black and white, advocating for abortion rights and against government austerity measures.

In front of the Aula Magna, the largest classroom in the building, I met Emilse Icandri, a junior art student wearing a red T-shirt that read “Las Rojas” (the red ones). A member of Ya Basta, an anti-capitalist college organization, Icandri was overseeing the check-in table for an open class where some two hundred students were discussing the future of the school and how to best resist the government’s attempts to defund it.

“We have sent letters requesting funds and urging that the government reconsider its plan, but we have come to realize that the institutional way is a dead end,” she explained. “It is frustrating, because our concerns are ignored, and all political factions seem to be allowing the government’s agenda to proceed unchecked.” Behind her, applause signaled the end of one speaker’s presentation, the noise blending with the sound of the rain that had started to patter on the corrugated tin roof.

A week later, I spoke to Natalia Zaracho, a former scrap collector turned representative in 2019, and reelected in 2023. Zaracho won her seat in the House for UTEP, the Union for the Workers of the Popular Economy, which represents people who live, as she once did, on the fringes of the formal economy. That day, UTEP and other social organizations staged pickets on bridges and avenues, cutting off main access points to Buenos Aires, as a response to the government cessation of food supplies to thousands of soup kitchens.

“Today there’s a palpable sense of urgency,” Zaracho began, glancing first at me and then over my shoulder. A muted television behind me flickered with the images of rows of riot police in full gear, arms locked on a street, poised for the arrival of the first column of protesters advancing into Buenos Aires from the neighboring city of Avellaneda. “We represent the new workers of the twenty-first century — those who work but have no rights,” Zaracho declared.

Behind Zaracho hangs a painting of a litter picker in a blue and yellow uniform, stacking a wall of papers from floor to ceiling. A friend, she tells me, gave her that painting on the day she got elected, a reminder of her roots, and she has kept it in her office ever since. As a child during the 2001 crisis, Zaracho learned the city by picking cardboard with her parents. Comparing then to now, she noted that social movements today are much more organized. They have spokespeople, representatives, and a powerful media presence.

“We stand united and strong, and I can’t fathom our movements putting up with this kind of starvation program for much longer,” she said.

Pablo Calvi is the author of Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism and an associate professor at Stony Brook University. His work has appeared in the Believer, the Nation, and Guernica magazine.

Argentine diplomats expelled from Colombia following explosive comments by Milei / by People’s Dispatch

Argentine President Javier Milei with US Ambassador in Argentina Marc Stanley

In an interview with CNN, the Argentine president called Petro a “terrorist assassin”, Mexican President López Obrador “ignorant”, and declared that Israel was not committing “any excesses” in Gaza

Reposted from People’s Dispatch

Argentine President Javier Milei with US Ambassador in Argentina Marc Stanley

Argentina’s libertarian president Javier Milei is under fire from his counterparts in the region for comments made during an interview with CNN Español. In response to his explosive comments, wherein he called Colombia’s president a “terrorist assassin”, Colombia’s Foreign Ministry announced the expulsion of Argentina’s diplomats from its embassy in Bogotá, Colombia.

The Foreign Ministry wrote in a statement, “This is not the first time that Mr. Milei offends the Colombian head of state, affecting the historical relationship of brotherhood between Colombia and Argentina.”

Indeed, Milei made similar comments about the leftist president back in January. When asked what he thought about the Colombian president, Milei told right-wing Colombian-American journalist Patricia Janiot that he is a “communist assassin that is sinking Colombia”.

In the statement released by the Colombian government, they highlighted: “The expressions of the Argentine president have deteriorated the confidence of our nation, in addition to offending the dignity of President Petro, who was democratically elected.”

Meanwhile, former Argentine president Alberto Fernández also condemned the statement by his successor. “I regret and categorically reject the statements of President Javier Milei, who has mistreated the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro. My solidarity with the president of the Colombian people. The derogatory and disqualifying way in which the Argentine president expresses himself about presidents legitimately elected by their people and who are recognized leaders throughout Latin America is absolutely inadmissible.”

Gustavo Petro himself responded to Milei’s comments on Thursday and stated, “I believe that Milei seeks to destroy, or at least postpone, the project of Latin American integration. Today the Argentine people suffer and poverty increases. Milei’s promise to repeat the neoliberal system of 30 years ago may be a failure foretold; His thesis in the world that he has seen today as neoliberalism led to worsening the climate crisis, and putting us on the brink of extinction, as a species, is not accurate. The Argentine people are the ones who must discuss these issues and decide.”

He added, “Despite the insults, we must preserve the project of unity, in diversity, of Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Since winning the elections, Milei has rejected the pro-Global South integration position of his predecessors, instead pledging his priority and allegiance to the United States. Weeks after he was sworn in, Milei announced that Argentina would not join the BRICS economic bloc. The body had offered Argentina membership after its Johannesburg summit in August 2023, but Milei stated in December that it would rather do business with the US and Israel. So far Argentina has remained in the Latin American integration platforms but has threatened to withdraw from some.

Milei’s explosive comments were not reserved only for Colombia’s president. The CNN interviewer mentioned that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had said some “tough words” about Milei, to which the Argentine president said “That an ignorant person like López Obrador speaks ill of me exalts me”.

The Mexican head of state responded to the comments on Thursday saying, “Milei stated that I am ‘ignorant’ because I called him a ‘conservative fascist.’ You are right: I still do not understand how the Argentines, being so intelligent, voted for someone who is not accurate, who despises the people and who dared to accuse his countryman [Pope] Francisco of being a ‘communist’ and ‘representative of the Evil One in the earth’, when it comes to the most Christian Pope and defender of the poor that I have ever known or heard of. PS Hugs to Gustavo Petro.”

Another segment of the not-yet aired interview that was shared was regarding Milei’s views on Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. The staunch zionist declared: “Israel is not committing any excesses.”

The full interview is set to air this Sunday March 31.

Peoples Dispatch, formerly The Dawn News, is an international media project with the mission of bringing to you voices from people’s movements and organizations across the globe. Since its establishment three years ago, it has sought to ensure that the coverage of news from around the world is not restricted to the rhetoric of politicians and the fortunes of big companies but encompasses the richness and diversity of mobilizations from around the world.

Milei government shuts down institute against discrimination, xenophobia and racism: “It serves no purpose” / by Brasil de Fato

The institute was closed as part of the ultra-liberal policy implemented by Milei (Photo: The Presidency of Armenia)

The Milei government spokesman also questioned the ‘trustworthiness’ of those who lead certain government institutes

Reposted from Peoples Dispatch

The Argentine government of Javier Milei decided on February 22 to close the National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (Inadi), presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni announced in a press conference.

“The decision has been taken to proceed with the dismantling of institutes that serve absolutely no purpose, such as Inadi,” said Adorni. The Milei government spokesman also questioned the “suitability” of those who run certain government institutes and considered them to be “political pigeon holes or places to generate activist jobs.”

Created in 1995 by the Law on Discriminatory Acts, Inadi is a decentralized government body linked to the Argentine Ministry of Justice and Human Rights and aims to draw up national policies to combat “all forms of discrimination, xenophobia and racism.”

The agency, with offices throughout the country and 400 employees, receives an average of 2,500 complaints of discrimination a year, according to its latest report. The majority come from the labor or education sector, and are based on physical disability, sexual orientation or gender.

In November 2023, INADI launched a new communication channel for complaints via Whatsapp, which allowed people to request advice on situations of discrimination and ask for information on the training offered by the organization.

Since taking office on December 10, the ultra-liberal president has fired thousands of state employees and not renewed another 10,000 contracts, as well as paralyzing federally-funded public works across the country with the aim of cutting public spending.

This article was translated from an article originally published on Brasil de Fato.

Peoples Dispatch, formerly The Dawn News, is an international media project with the mission of bringing to you voices from people’s movements and organizations across the globe. Since its establishment three years ago, it has sought to ensure that the coverage of news from around the world is not restricted to the rhetoric of politicians and the fortunes of big companies but encompasses the richness and diversity of mobilizations from around the world.

Javier Milei’s Freak Show Act Is a Taste of Things to Come / by Dennis Kölling

Argentine president Javier Milei delivers a speech at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on January 17, 2024. (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images)

Argentina’s far-right president Javier Milei was enthusiastically received at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The warm welcome extended to Milei is a sign of where free-market radicalism is headed amid the deepening crisis of neoliberalism.

Reposted from Jacobin

Javier Milei’s warm welcome at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos was the latest stage in the seemingly baffling rise of radical right-wing libertarianism to political respectability. The recently elected president of Argentina, who brandished a chain saw during campaign rallies to symbolically cut through regulatory red tape, has become the new hero figure of the libertarian right.

Libertarianism has long been underestimated as a fringe political movement. We should see its bid for the political mainstream in relation to the development of its closest ideological ally, neoliberalism, alongside which it emerged as a right-wing phenomenon in the 1930s. The fact that libertarian leaders are gaining popularity just as the neoliberal era appears to be coming to an end points to a consolidation of market-radical ideologies rather than their dissolution.

Star of the Show

Schmoozing with the economic elite in Davos, Javier Milei used his podium at the WEF to caution his listeners that the “Western world is in danger.” Greeted by WEF founder Klaus Schwab as an “extraordinary person,” the Argentine president launched into a tirade against feminists, climate activists, and much of the academic establishment, whom he described as enemies of freedom and prosperity.

Ignoring attempts that the WEF has made to buy into topics of social responsibility and ecological transformation over recent years, Milei sought to reduce economics to the simple Randian clash between the “makers” and the “takers.” Closing on a nod to all the businessmen in the audience, he concluded: “You are heroes . . . let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral.”

Milei’s speech was quick to generate a buzz in the ultraliberal community around the world, which was unsurprisingly flattered by such compliments. WEF participants lauded him for sounding the alarm bells “just in time.” Elon Musk promoted his speech as a “good explanation” of the economics of prosperity, going on to share memes about Milei’s popularity on Twitter/X. Historian-turned-right-wing-pundit Niall Ferguson praised the talk as “a magnificent defense of individual liberty and the free market economy.”

The sight of Milei’s hard-core market radicalism taking center stage at the most important gathering of neoliberal stakeholders offered a rallying point to those on the Right who feared that economic liberalism had lost its edge when it attempted to greenwash its image by including social and environmental concerns in its call for a new capitalism.

While inclusion in the WEF marks a new high point in its fortunes, Milei’s brand of radical right-wing libertarianism had already seen a creeping resurgence over the last decade or so. The works of Ayn Rand, the ur-popularizer of American libertarianism and “Goddess of the Market,” experienced a notable revival following praise from Donald Trump and an array of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, a concerted effort by libertarian activists and investors has brought the idea of autonomous “seasteading” communities, beyond the reach of any state legislation, closer to realization than ever before. More subtly, the influence of libertarian utopias, such as those imagined by science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, have permeated recent revivals of classic hard science fiction on popular streaming platforms.

Libertarianism and Neoliberalism

At the same time that libertarian ideologies began to gain mainstream popularity, commentators on the Left were starting to debate the end of an era dominated by free-market economics. Neoliberalism, libertarianism’s slightly more respectable brother, appeared to have received its death knell in the global reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to unprecedented forms of government intervention and new state-based approaches to problems of social welfare and environmental crisis.

Others saw the end of neoliberalism augured in the election of Donald Trump and the isolationist, xenophobic, and plainly illiberal policies that his administration embraced. As the 2020s progressed, neoliberalism was considered by many to be a spent force.

It might very well be true that what we are seeing right now marks the end of a moderate, centrist version of “open society” neoliberalism, so appealing for decades even to many on the erstwhile social democratic left. But the rising popularity of more extreme forms of libertarianism around the world should caution us that market radicalism isn’t simply going to disappear. Instead, it is consolidating its ideology and returning to its cultural roots.

Milei’s dramatic warning that Western civilization faces grave peril is no mere rhetorical trope designed to garner more attention in today’s polarized social media landscape. It is deeply embedded in a fatalistic tradition that Milei shares with the earliest neoliberal and libertarian thinkers of the 1930s and ’40s. Friedrich Hayek’s pamphlet The Road to Serfdom (1944), similarly directed against the threat of “collectivism,” opens by speaking of an “unexpected turn” that has led the “course of civilization” to reverse toward “past ages of barbarism.”

The statement of aims drafted at the first meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international gathering of neoliberal intellectuals, politicians, and business figures, put it in equally blunt terms: “The central values of civilization are in danger.” Economic planning, according to these early neoliberals, would inevitably lead us down the “road to serfdom” and totalitarianism.

While they may have branched out into intellectually distinct movements over time, both neoliberalism and right-wing libertarianism shared a moment of conception and a foundational myth. Born from the intellectually pessimistic climate that characterized the mainstream liberal response to the rise of totalitarian ideologies in the 1930s and ’40s, those favoring a revival of liberalism in bleak times sought to do so by styling themselves as bulwarks against the totalitarian threat.

While European neoliberals like Hayek put a stronger focus on the “collectivist” danger of communism and fascism, American libertarians like H. L. Mencken, Rose Wilder Lane, or Isabel Paterson included staunch opposition to the politics of the New Deal in their assessment of totalitarianism from an early stage. Both sides, however, initially embraced a dramatic fatalism that presented any appeal to collective action as a threat to civilization at large.

Zombie Neoliberalism

The “specter of totalitarianism” invoked by Hayek and many of his fellow travelers became a discursive tool to fend off discussions of inequality and stop any concerns for social justice in their tracks. It was soon used to attack even popular democracy as such. In a series of books, neoliberal historian Jacob L. Talmon sought to deconstruct the legacy of the French revolution, warning that it had resulted in the rise of a dangerous “totalitarian Messianic democracy.”

Talmon’s intervention was part of a larger debate around the historical determinism that was supposedly inherent to emancipatory understandings of democracy, with Hayek and Karl Popper among the leading protagonists. What neoliberals and libertarians embraced instead was the notion of market democracy, pioneered by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, in which each purchase or sale in a marketplace should be considered a vote that represents the ideals of democracy far better than a state-centered approach ever could. In this framework, the market, ironically praised as the savior of democratic civilization, was at the same time expected to gradually replace popular democracy.

Only in the 1960s, in reaction to the emancipatory politics of the New Left, would the proponents of moderate neoliberalism and radical libertarianism truly split. Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard dismissed the egalitarian protest of the decades on the basis of a racialized notion of human nature. This would gradually lead him and his followers to the far-right fringes of American politics, forming the basis of today’s alt-right, as historian Quinn Slobodian has recently shown.

A decade later, neoliberals under the supervision of Milton Friedman got the chance to test themselves in active policymaking when they became key economic advisers in the government of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Conveniently ignoring their creed’s anti-totalitarian past, neoliberalism found its way to the intellectual mainstream — powerfully underlined by the award of Nobel Prizes for economics to Hayek in 1974 and Friedman in 1976 — on the backs of the Chilean people and the long-lasting impact of the economic shock doctrine pursued by the Pinochet regime.

In his idiosyncratic self-stylization, Javier Milei has paid tribute to both of these concurrent ideologies. One of his five beloved English Mastiffs is called “Murray,” another “Milton.” His revival of the specter of totalitarianism on the platform of the WEF in Davos may be a sign that the schism between more moderate neoliberals and radical libertarians is healing.

While the ostensible antistatism of this current of thought conceals the myriad ways in which neoliberal policymakers actually sought to use the state instead of abolishing it, it also drives home the point that market radicals have no qualms about doing away with democracy for good.

They might come for it under the pretense of defending “Western civilization,” embracing authoritarian leaders like Milei, Donald Trump, or Jair Bolsonaro along the way.

It is unlikely that in the face of a new crisis of liberalism, they are simply going to abandon the neoliberal legacy and let it die. Instead, the next wave of “zombie neoliberalism” is about to break. Brace for impact.

Dennis Kölling is a researcher in intellectual history at the European University Institute and a doctoral fellow at the Leibniz Institute for European History.

Argentine Unions Lead General Strike Against Milei’s Neoliberal Blitz / by Brett Wilkins

Protesters hold a banner reading, “The homeland is not for sale” during a January 24, 2024 general strike against the government of Argentine President Javier Milei in Buenos Aires | Photo: Marcelo Endelli/Getty Images

“In 40 years of democracy, there has never been such a frontal attack on the labor sector,” said one union leader.

Reposted from Common Dreams

Many thousands of Argentine workers walked off their jobs and took to the streets Wednesday in a general strike led by the nation’s largest labor unions against far-right President Javier Milei’s all-out assault on worker rights, vital social programs, and the right to protest.

The opposition-aligned Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), an umbrella labor group boasting about 7 million members, led the general strike against Milei, a 53-year-old self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who took office last month following his decisive victory in November’s presidential runoff.

Marching under the slogan, “Our Homeland Is Not For Sale,” the CGT-led demonstrators filled streets in the capital Buenos Aires and smaller cities around the South American country of nearly 46 million inhabitants.

“We called a march on [January] 24 to defend labor rights, severance pay, collective bargaining agreements, social security, and the right to protest, all of which have been attacked by the DNU,” CGT explained on social media, referring to Milei’s December 20 Decree of Necessity and Urgency.

CGT leader Pablo Moyano said Wednesday in Buenos Aires that “every time a [neoliberal] model wins, the first thing they target is the workers.”

Martín Lucero, head of the private teachers’ union in Rosario, Argentina’s third-largest city, toldLa Capital that “in 40 years of democracy there has never been such a frontal attack on the labor sector” as there has been under Milei.

Estela De Carlotto, who leads the activist group Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo—founded by grandmothers searching for children kidnapped under Argentina’s U.S.-backed 1976-83 military dictatorship, which Milei has praised—toldBuenos Aires Times that the demonstration “is a way of giving support to this resolution from the people to form a protest and a call of attention for this whole situation we are living with this strange government.”

Milei—who said he gets political advice from his dogs—has unleashed what critics have called “a textbook case of shock therapy” on the Argentine people and the country’s moribund economy, devaluing the peso by 50%, slashing social spending, reducing government subsidies, and opening the nation to foreign capitalist exploitation.

According to Juan Cruz Ferre, a postdoctoral fellow at the Program in Latin American Studies at New Jersey’s Princeton University:

The economic plan was followed by an all-encompassing presidential decree issued on December 20, affecting issues as diverse as labor law, healthcare, foreign trade, private property, and mining. The general thrust of it is very clear: an attack on workers’ rights, the liberalization of the economy, the strengthening of big business through market deregulation and numerous incentives, and the erosion of protections for tenants, the environment, and small businesses.

Although courts have suspended parts of Milei’s decree in response to legal challenges, Cruz Ferre explained, “attention has now shifted to a mirror bill presented to Congress, which includes all issues contained in the decree, plus a request of extraordinary powers to the executive for a period of four years.”

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week, Milei hailed the corporate executives and wealthy global elites gathered there as “heroes” and “creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen.”

From November to December, prices in Argentina increased by more than one quarter, compared with just under 13% the previous month. Annual inflation now stands at 211%, with Argentina rivaling Lebanon for the dubious global top spot.

“In this government of Milei, all the food halls of all the social organizations, of the churches, have not received food [from the government],” one Buenos Aires protester said during Wednesday’s march.

“There is no food; they told us that there is no money,” the demonstrator added, even as the government adopts “measures in favor of the wealthy sector.”

The CGT on Wednesday published a statement “in defense of the civil, social, and labor rights of our nation.”

“Today we see how the government seeks to break the social contract through policies and reforms that only seek to subjugate the rights and achievements of the Argentine people,” the statement asserted. “We reaffirm our conviction about the importance of social dialogue as the only tool to grow with equity, and that allows us to develop a ‘sustainable strategy to achieve development, production, and decent work, with social justice.'”

Argentine Security Minister Patricia Bullrich dismissed the strike as the work of “mafia unionists, poverty managers, complicit judges, and corrupt politicians, all defending their privileges, resisting the change that society decided democratically and that the president leads with determination.”

From Brazil to Belgium, unions throughout the Americas and Europe staged solidarity rallies with Argentine workers.

“The [Argentine] government adopted a perverse combination of radical political authoritarianism with dictatorial tendencies and ultraliberal policies that mostly undermine workers,” Unified Workers’ Central, Brazil’s largest trade union, said in a statement.

Myriam Bregman, a Socialist Workers’ Party member of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Argentina’s National Congress, said in a Wednesday interview with Left Voice that “international solidarity is key to defeating Milei’s attacks on the working class in Argentina.”

“Milei, as he made clear at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, is a friend to the superrich, whom he treats as heroes,” she added. “It is in the interests of the international working class that we prevent the government from moving forward with its anti-worker policies.”

Cruz Ferre wrote that “the current [Argentine] government has declared war on workers, women, human rights activists, the environment, and more. The goal is clear: to make tabula rasa of all past gains and concessions to the working class, and reset the conditions for profits through the unrestrained exploitation of labor.”

“A determined, organized, and massive resistance will be necessary to preserve the rights that are today under attack,” he added. “The outcome of these battles will have implications for many years to come.”

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

‘All feminists are under attack’: ultra-right threat in Milei’s Argentina forces writer into exile / by Uki Goni

Exiled feminist writer Luciana Peker holding up one of her books: ‘My fear does what it always does to women, it shuts me up,’ she said. Photograph: Salvador Batalla

The new president’s rightwing supporters are targeting journalists and women’s rights activists – but the fight goes on

Reposted from the Guardian

Female journalists who write about gender issues say they are having to deal with a toxic wave of threats against them in Argentina. Some are fighting back, others are lying low and one has gone into self-imposed exile for her safety.

“We are facing a witch-hunt from the ultra-right,” said the author, journalist and activist Luciana Peker, who recently left Argentina for an undisclosed location due to the weight of threats against her.

Argentina became the largest Latin American nation legalise abortion in 2020, but its newly elected far-right libertarian president, Javier Milei, campaigned to overturn the law saying he would call a referendum on it if necessary.

The #NiUnaMenos (“not one less”) movement marches that began in 2015 put Argentina at the forefront in the struggle for women’s and gender rights in Latin America.

But the libertarian movement that helped propel Milei to power last month appeared to deliberately target feminists when it started building its follower base in 2018.

“Feminism in Argentina has been a driving force in the struggle for women’s rights across Latin America, which is why it is so important for the global libertarian ultra-right to try to discipline Argentinian women,” said Peker.

A ‘Ni una menos’ march against femicide in Buenos Aires, June 2016. Photograph: Eitan Abramovich/AFP/Getty Images

“They were on a crusade similar to the one in several western countries against anything related to progressive movements, with feminism at the head,” added the journalist Giselle Leclercq.

Leclercq, who covered Argentina’s nascent libertarian movement for the independent media company Perfil, suffered hundreds of attacks when she revealed how feminist journalists were being targeted.

“They put my home address online … one libertarian sent me a direct message saying he would come to the newsroom and eat my liver,” Leclercq told the Guardian.

Other female journalists describe similar abuse.

The writer Claudia Piñeiro, who has received hundreds of threats. Photograph: Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images

“All feminists are under attack,” said one of Argentina’s most successful authors, Claudia Piñeiro, who said she receives hundreds of threats and abusive messages every time she checks her social media accounts.

“They tell me they know my phone number, that they know my favourite cafe, they send me hundreds of photos of erect penises, they call me a shitty old woman,” she said.

Piñeiro, who was shortlisted for the international Booker prize in 2022, said that the threats against feminists are a targeted campaign. “I’ve had to consult doctors because of the effect on my physical and mental health.”

Leclercq said Milei tapped into a portion of the population that is “very angry with the advance of gender rights, angry with feminism, and schoolboys bitter that their female classmates were suddenly empowered and stood up to them”.

Milei’s voting base was made up in large part by such underemployed young males in a country where a third of the electorate is aged between 16 and 29.

“Young men respond to Milei because he represents them: broken, unbalanced, with the right to instil fear,” Peker said. “My fear does what it always does to women, it shuts me up. Women’s freedom recedes with the advance of machismo – men who flee from women, the men Milei represents, the macho-sphere.”

A supporter of Javier Milei with a fake chainsaw during a campaign rally in Córdoba, Argentina, November 2023. Photograph: Nicolás Aguilera/AP

Before the country’s general election last year, Periodistas Argentinas, a feminist press freedom group of 220 female journalists, issued a statement warning of the “proliferation of hate speech” against them and the “exclusion of our voices” from media companies that tend to elbow out threatened journalists from their staff.

“The question is how to keep reporting while we’re shaking with fear,” said the group’s founder, Claudia Acuña. “No one is going to look after us so we need to walk hand in hand together, think together, engage in collective self-defence.”

Uki Goni is a writer based in Argentina and the author of The Real Odessa: How Nazi War Criminals Escaped Europe

Argentine courts grant union’s request and suspend Milei’s labor reform / by Brasil de Fato

Labor reform is one of the points of Milei’s decree (Photo: Mídia NINJA)

Reposted from People’s Dispatch

The measures are part of a “decree” announced by the far-right president in December.

The Argentine judiciary has granted a request from the National Confederation of Labor (CGT), the country’s main trade union center, and suspended the effects of the labor reform provided for in the “decree” launched by the government of ultra-right Javier Milei last December. The court decision published on January 3 is a precautionary one, i.e. it suspends the measure.

The decision was taken by the National Chamber of Labor Appeals, the first instance in the Argentine judiciary for appeals on labor issues. The court argued that there was no proven need or urgency to make the decision without consulting the Argentine Congress, which is responsible for legislation.

The “decretazo” is formally called the Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU), and is provided for in the Argentine Constitution. However, the executive branch can only issue this type of decree when there are exceptional circumstances and it is not possible to wait for Congress to meet.

Among other measures, the Milei government’s labor reform extends the probationary period for new employees from three to eight months (thus increasing the period in which employers can fire new workers without paying severance pay).

It also authorized the dismissal of workers who take part in picket lines or occupy workplaces during stoppages or strikes, as well as changes to overtime compensation systems.

According to Argentine newspaper La Nación, Wednesday’s court decision came as a surprise to the government. Clarín, another daily in the country, said that the government will appeal to higher courts to overturn the injunction issued by the Labor Appeals Chamber.

This article was translated from an article originally published in Portuguese on Brasil De Fato.

Argentine trade unions and social movements mobilize against Milei’s harsh austerity policies / by People’s Dispatch

Despite an extensive police operation, thousands of people gathered today around the Palace of Justice of Argentina, in this capital, to express their rejection of the measures of the Government of Javier Milei, Buenos Aires, Dec. 27 | Photo credit: Prensa Latina

Reposted from Peoples Dispatch

Trade unions are taking to the streets against the dismissal of 7,000 workers and other anti-people policies that are part of Javier Milei’s recent presidential decree.

Tens of thousands are expected to mobilize in Buenos Aires, Argentina in front of the country’s courts on Wednesday, December 27, to reject the Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU) 70/2023 announced by President Javier Milei on December 20 which severely undermines workers’ rights and promotes the deregulation of the economy.

Tens of thousands participating in the protest against Milei’s DNU. Photo: FOL

They will also be protesting the dismissal of 7,000 public workers, outlined in the DNU, and made official through another decree published in the Official Gazette.

The government has warned that it will use “all deterrent measures” in response to the protest including the “Public Order Protocol” announced by Minister of Security Patricia Bullrich on December 14. This protocol authorizes the police and security forces to intervene in response to any attempt to partially or totally block any national roads, transportation, or “free movement.” It has been dubbed the “anti-picket” protocol as it targets the historic picket and roadblock tactic of Argentine movements.

Another government “deterrence measure” is the threat from Bullrich that those who participate in protest actions and road blockades that are recipients of social programs will not receive this support: “he who blocks the street does not get paid,” she declared.

Wednesday’s protest has been called for by the country’s major trade union confederations and social movements such as the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), both Workers’ Central Union of Argentina (CTA), the Association of State Workers (ATE), Frente Patria Grande, and other major left movements and parties.

Trade union and social leaders in the country stated that they are mobilizing in front of the courts to highlight the unconstitutionality of Milei’s decree and seek protections from the court to nullify the DNU.

“No one expects us to accept a single layoff,” the General Secretary of ATE Rodolfo Aguiar said in a statement.

He added, “If the government moves forward with these layoffs, workers and families will be directly affected, but indirectly, the entire community will be affected. In the State, any dismissal translates into a loss of rights for all our people.”

Peoples Dispatch, formerly The Dawn News, is an international media project with the mission of bringing to you voices from people’s movements and organizations across the globe. Since its establishment three years ago, it has sought to ensure that the coverage of news from around the world is not restricted to the rhetoric of politicians and the fortunes of big companies but encompasses the richness and diversity of mobilizations from around the world.

Argentinians Defy Milei’s Crackdown With Mass Protests Against Austerity / by Julia Conley

Members of the Argentinian Tire Workers’ Union and other protesters demonstrate against the new government of Javier Milei in Buenos Aires, on December 20, 2023, carrying signs that read, “We say no to the increase in electricity, gas, and transport tickets.” | Photo: Juan Mabromata/AFP via Getty Images

Reposted from Common Dreams

“This country’s problem is not protests,” said one demonstrator. “The country’s problem is that Milei took away 50% of our purchasing power overnight with a devaluation.”

Days after Argentinian President Javier Milei’s security minister announced that law enforcement would crack down on anyone who organizes or participates in protests that block roads, thousands of residents risked arrest and cuts to their social benefit payments by taking to the streets Wednesday night and into Thursday morning, rallying against Milei’s latest package of austerity measures.

Buenos Aires residents responded to Milei’s announcement of new anti-worker economic decrees on Wednesday by banging pots and pans on their balconies before congregating on streets across the capital and marching to the National Congress.

Protesters chanted, “Milei! You’re garbage! You are the dictatorship!” and carried signs reading, “We say no to the increase in electricity, gas, and transport tickets”—a reference to measures the right-wing president unveiled earlier this month when he announced the devaluation of the peso by 50% and cuts to public spending and energy and transportation subsidies.

The measure announced Wednesday will further intensify Milei’s austerity approach in a country where about 40% of residents live in poverty.

Milei’s decree will pave the way for state-owned companies to be privatized, mining to be deregulated, firms to strip workers of rights including maternity leave, and foreign companies to invest in rental housing and land.

Critics including former presidential candidate Myriam Bregman of the progressive Workers’ Left Front accused Milei of violating the Argentinian Constitution by bypassing Congress to introduce the new measures.

“There are so many illegalities here I don’t know where to start,” Bregman toldThe Guardian, saying the president had released a “battle plan against working people.”

Hector Daer, secretary of the General Confederation of Labor, told Telesur English that Milei’s announcement “subverts the democratic republican order and disrupts the division of powers.”

“His unconstitutionality is evident,” Daer said. “We will not tolerate an attack on social security and labor and social rights.”

Protesters also took to the streets before Milei’s announcement Wednesday, honoring the victims of the violent repression of former President Fernando de la Rúa’s administration, which cracked down on mass protests on December 20, 2001. Nearly 40 people were killed in the clashes more than two decades ago and almost 500 were injured.

The protests on Wednesday were met with a show of force by police in riot gear, but El País reported that the mobilization proved too large for security forces to quell it.

Picketing—blocking streets and highways—is “one of Argentina’s most common forms of protest,” according to the newspaper, and too many demonstrators turned out to limit the protest to only sidewalks. El País reported that people rallied in city streets without blocking “main traffic arteries” and that only two arrests were made.

Protesters said Milei’s administration is more concerned with pressuring people out of protesting than responding to the concerns of citizens who fear losing their pensions and jobs as a result of the austerity measures.

“This country’s problem is not protests,” Betina Sanchís, a retiree, told El País. “The country’s problem is that Milei took away 50% of our purchasing power overnight with a devaluation.”

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.