Enforcing this economic shock therapy has required increasingly dictatorial forms of rule. For months, there have been continuous waves of protests by pensioners, university occupations, strikes by teachers, healthcare workers and virtually every sector of the working class.
Milei has responded with naked police state repression and the criminalization of political opposition. His administration decreed a draconian anti-protest measure, outlawing the blocking of streets, picket lines and strikes in a multitude of sectors. Elderly retirees protesting the reduction of their pensions to below subsistence levels have been assaulted with water cannon, tear gas and truncheons.
Meanwhile, Milei has doubled down on vindicating the crimes of the fascist military dictatorship that ruled Argentina for nearly a decade following a 1976 CIA-backed coup. About 30,000 leftist workers, youth, and intellectuals were kidnapped, killed and disappeared under the fascist junta, while tens of thousands more were arrested and tortured.
Milei is not only being held up as a model by Trump, but has been a star guest at the main forums of the financial oligarchy and world imperialism, including the last World Economic Forum in Davos, the G7 summit in Italy, and was given a red-carpet treatment by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He will meet with French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday and attend the G20 Summit in Brazil on Monday.
The Biden administration has also praised his economic policies and called the Argentine union bureaucracy a “model,” encouraging it to work closely with Milei. This collaboration has resulted in the isolation of strikes and other efforts to suppress massive social opposition.
The Pentagon under Biden strengthened ties with the Milei administration and approved its purchase of warplanes and the setting up of US munitions factories in the country. US imperialism sees the Milei administration as a spearhead against Chinese, Russian and Iranian influence in Latin America, which it still scornfully regards as its “own backyard.”
Milei has visited and developed close ties with the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose party is Brothers of Italy, the neo-fascist successor of Mussolini, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is intensifying the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The financial-corporate oligarchy is attempting to reorganize the world over by means of social counterrevolution and political dictatorship. Trump and Milei represent this program which is directed at extinguishing all conceptions of social equality, including those embodied in the American Revolution and Civil War.
Such a dramatic change to the political forms of rule by the capitalist ruling class will inevitably produce even deeper political crises and the eruption of mass social struggles. However, the threat of fascism and world war can only be defeated by the conscious, revolutionary intervention of the working class on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.
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Publish date : 2024-11-15 16:53:00
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