After a year in office, maverick President Javier Milei has proved surprisingly successful. He has stabilized the country and many have hope that conditions will improve – but others are outraged.
Argentina’s national flag can be seen everywhere around the country.
Rodrigo Abd / AP
When they hear the destination, four Uber drivers cancel the trip. Two cabdrivers simply refuse to go. The neighborhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires is called Gregorio de Laferrere. It is said to be one of the poorest neighborhoods in the capital’s greater metropolitan area, and the one with the most violence. But on this sunny morning in early December, the residential area with its humble little houses seems tranquil – despite the green sewage runoff flowing in the ditch in front of the houses, and the metal bars securing the windows.
Edhit Tejada steers her wheelchair out the door and asks me to come inside to her kitchen. Her daughter-in-law has baked a cake. Visitors from the city are served coffee instead of mate tea in a gourd. Tejada, 64, discusses how her life has changed since President Javier Milei took office in the distant government palace. «For the first time in a long time, we have stability,» she begins the conversation. It sounds as if she has won the lottery.
At first glance, the improvements seem modest. Inflation has not exploded, as it has done several times before. The chaos expected by many has not materialized. The protests in which demonstrators used to block streets for days on end, with nobody going to work, have stopped. Her neighborhood has become safer, she says. «Nobody used to go out on the street after 7 o’clock in the evening,» she says. «There were regular shootouts between the drug gangs. That’s over.» Today the police are patrolling here, she says.
Milei imposed tough austerity measures on Argentina right from the start. His administration laid off 33,000 state employees. State spending was cut by 25%, and subsidies for electricity and transportation were eliminated. Milei boasts that it is the most brutal austerity program that any government has ever implemented in such a short period of time.
Infonews
At the same time, the poverty rate rose rapidly, to a peak of as much as 11 percentage points above its previous level. For the last three months, it has again been on the decline. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses, 52% of Argentines are currently living below the poverty line.
Tejada can see this in her neighborhood. People can afford less, she says. There are families who have nothing on the table at the end of the month. She wouldn’t be able to make ends meet herself without the support of her family, she adds. She receives the equivalent of $200 dollars per month in disability benefits – but no state pension. This isn’t enough to live on.
Costs have risen rapidly. Tejada pulls out her electricity bill. Today, she is paying the equivalent of $260. That sum has tripled, she says. The bare kitchen houses only a washing machine and a refrigerator. She lives in this house, which has been supplemented with an addition and another building in the backyard, with her two children’s families and a total of five grandchildren. Her son-in-law earns around $2,000 a month as a janitor at the hospital, a good job. At the beginning of the month, all his money goes directly to repaying debts. Her daughter earns the equivalent of $1,000 per month as an adult education teacher.
Little sign of growth, but there is hope
The recession has been over since April. Since then, the economy has recovered slightly. The recovery weakened somewhat in October. Nevertheless, many economists expect Argentina to grow in the coming year. «There is still no sign of an economic recovery here,» Tejada says.
Marcos Brindicci / Reuters
Nevertheless, she is surprisingly confident. «A change is underway,» she says. «With Milei, it’s the first time we have hope that something can change.» More and more people agree. According to polling company Poliarquía, 56% of the country’s population gives Milei’s government positive ratings after its first year. A majority also expects 2025 to be better than this past year. Experts at the Catholic University in Buenos Aires predict that the poverty rate at the end of 2024 will actually be slightly lower than when Milei took office.
Tejada says she is fed up with being dependent on the goodwill of politicians, as she has been for the past 20 years. «Sometimes there has been a food basket, sometimes an extra bonus payment for Christmas,» she says. But often these were only for people who were politically aligned with the government.
She points to the other side of the street. There, in front of the sports club’s offices, older women are standing in line and waiting. The queue isn’t moving. There is the policy typical of the Peronists – the largely leftist party that was in power before Milei – in the poor districts, Tejada says. Here is how that works: The club owner rents out his sports field to schools. The municipality pays him for it. In order to continue receiving public funds, he distributes food to people who promise to vote for him. With a disgusted tone, Tejada says: «What annoys me most is that they treat us like idiots with their handouts.»
Rodrigo Abd / AP
Failed women’s rights policies in the outskirts
Milei has dissolved half the government’s previous ministries, including the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity. Tejada, who heads a neighborhood women’s group called «Mujeres Líderes,» or Women Leaders, doesn’t mind – though not because she thinks women’s issues have no place in politics. On the contrary: Violence against women is a major problem in Gregorio de Laferrere, she says. There have been three femicides here in the last month, she notes. State measures combating violence against women are therefore urgently needed, she says. But they haven’t worked in the past. Women have tended to put off calling the emergency services. There are no women’s shelters where they can seek safety from violent partners, Tejada says. Nor do the police care about the issue, she adds. «Women’s policies were extremely politicized – but not very effective,» she says.
Shortly after she was born, Tejada contracted polio. For this reason, her family moved with her from the Andean province of San Juan to Buenos Aires when she was a little girl. Argentina was rich at the time, and so there was free state-provided treatment, she remembers. «At the highest level of quality,» she says. She has tears in her eyes as she recounts how she underwent surgery as a child and received years of medical care, as well as therapeutic, educational and artistic support. «We went to museums, to the opera, got a comprehensive education and even as disabled people were integrated into society.» She says she would have liked to become a lawyer or a psychologist.
She says she has not yet been affected by Milei’s program of cuts to the public health system. Her treatment at the state hospital is supposed to continue as normal. She has also applied for a new wheelchair, which will arrive soon, she says hopefully.
Low salaries even for top doctors
Still, employees at state hospitals have mounted protests against Milei in recent months. It is not easy to get an interview with any of the hospital directors. This is probably because they want to avoid incurring the government’s displeasure, people say. However, Pablo Puccar wants to talk – and to be quoted. It is 7:15 a.m. when we meet. The 48-year-old pediatrician is a specialist in internal medicine and a professor at the University of Buenos Aires. He has already put on his white coat. He is about to start his day at the operating table as department head at the J. P. Garrahan hospital.
The Garrahan is considered a leading pediatric facility in Latin America. Many childhood diseases have been first treated here with experimental therapies. The hospital is a leader in the fields of cancer treatment for newborns and pediatric transplants. Some of the doctors are international luminaries. When doctors at other clinics don’t know what to do, they send children to this facility, Puccar says. «We are their last hope,» he adds.
But salaries and wages at the facility have not kept pace with inflation, he says. He himself has experienced a loss of purchasing power of 60% in one year due to Milei’s policies, he notes. Buenos Aires is now as expensive as Madrid, he says. After 20 years of work, he earns the equivalent of $2,400 a month. «I can’t support my family on that,» says the father of two daughters.
More and more medical professionals are going abroad, where they can earn between five times as much (in Spain) and 10 times as much (in the United States) as in Argentina. «We are losing the entire experience of a generation of doctors,» Puccar says. «If the doctors leave, the hospital will be finished in three years. And there is no coming back from that.»
Puccar estimates that two-thirds of the doctors at the Garrahan voted for Milei. Now they must recognize that he is serious about wanting to destroy the state, and has no intention of excluding the hospitals, he says. In all of Argentina’s previous crises, the flagship pediatric hospital has always been spared, he notes.
What bothers him most, Puccar says, is that his work as a doctor is not valued by the government. Rather, he and his colleagues are insulted as lazy civil servants, as a corrupt gang. «We all work here much more than it says in our contracts,» he tells me, then says goodbye.
Weakening trade union resistance
When Milei took office, trade unionists and Peronists predicted that he would not last two months in office. In reality, however, the strikes grandly announced by the once-powerful trade unions have had little effect. Union leaders are now trying to establish good relations with the government. Some of them want to stand as candidates in the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 2025. To do this, they need to bring state funds into their districts.
The only mass protests that have eaten into the government’s approval ratings have come from the universities. In April and October, tens of thousands of students and their families took to the streets to protest cuts in the education sector.
There has always been a consensus in Argentina that public universities should be accessible to all, says Martin Kaufmann, rector of the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, or UNTREF, a medium-sized university with 27,000 students. Unlike in the rest of Latin America, the vast majority of academic education in Argentina takes place at public universities, he says.
The universities are traditionally associated with political parties. They have had links to the left-wing Peronist bloc, or been close to the centrist Radical Civic Union. Even the Trotskyists have had influence on individual universities. Kaufmann’s university has ties to the Peronists, he says.
Kaufmann receives visitors in a rectorate hall that might even make a French minister feel at home. This is an 8-meter-high room with designer furniture and marble and parquet flooring in a palatial building, in a prime city location close to the embassies. The rector half-heartedly defends the majestic ambience, noting that the university pays only a symbolic rent for the space – astounding.
He refers to the social function of his university: 80% of students at UNTREF on the outskirts of Buenos Aires are the first in their family to go to college, he says. The Milei government’s argument that only the rich go to public universities is far from the truth, Kaufmann asserts. Just like the government’s accusation that university budgets lack transparency, he adds.
The newfound stability is more important than budget cuts
Kaufmann bemoans the cuts in state funding. University administrators do not know how they will be able to pay the teachers in the coming school year, he says. Salaries are low, he adds, and instructors are migrating to private universities.
Later in the conversation, his fellow rector Carlos Greco from the equally Peronist Universidad San Martín says that the cuts are annoying, but he personally finds it much more irritating that society is showing no solidarity with the universities. He is outraged, he says: «Everyone is trying to save themselves as best they can!»
Sociologist Pablo Semán says that many Argentines in fact oppose Milei’s cuts to the education, health care and pension systems. «But almost everyone is of the opinion that Argentina needs a fresh start,» he adds. And as long as Milei continues to bring inflation rates down, he will be in a strong political position, the sociologist predicts. Milei is offering people «stability,» which has been a rare commodity in recent years, Semán adds. «That is balm for the soul.»
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Publish date : 2024-12-12 00:28:00
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