El Loco

Javier Milei means to remake Argentina. With a chainsaw if need be.

Since taking office in December, Argentine President Javier Milei has been making the rounds among right-wing admirers. Here, he speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, on Feb. 24.

Lev Radin / Wikimedia Commons

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S8 E5. El Loco

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Argentina’s new president is a libertarian populist and, by his own account, an anarcho-capitalist. To tackle his county’s deep economic troubles, Javier Milei wants to dismantle state institutions, implement severe austerity measures and strip protections for workers. He also wants to outlaw abortion. But in a country with a strong tradition of organized labor and women’s movements, so far he has sown mainly chaos. We speak with a journalist and a sociologist who say Milei’s methods are madness.

Workers groups took the streets of the capital, Buenos Aires, on Dec. 20 in the first mass protest against President Milei’s reforms.

Mattia Fossati / Shutterstock

Indeed, Milei, a former TV personality, is nicknamed “El Loco.”

With the third-biggest economy in Latin America, Argentina has bounced from crisis to crisis over the past century, enduring dictatorships and multiple defaults on its national debt. Milei’s antiestablishment rhetoric energized a disgruntled electorate — he gained close to 56 percent of the vote in October’s election — but the opposition against his divisive politics is equally vocal and now well organized.

This week’s show features the debut appearance of our assistant producer Nicholas Scott in the host’s chair alongside Siva. Nick is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia and an expert on labor relations in Latin America.

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Lucía Cholakian Herrera

Lucía Cholakian Herrera is a freelance journalist and podcast producer working in Buenos Aires. Her reporting has appeared in Rest of the World, the North American Congress on Latin America and The New York Times. In 2022, Cholakian was named an Emerging Media Leader by the International Center for Journalists. Follow her @luciacholakian.

Verónica Gago

Verónica Gago is a professor of social science at the University of Buenos Aires and at the National University of San Martín. She’s also an activist and member of the Latin American women’s movement Ni Una Menos — “Not One Less.” Gago is the author of several books, most recently, with Lucí Cavallero, A Feminist Reading of Debt (2021, Pluto Press), as well as Feminist International: How to Change Everything (2020, Verso); and Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (2017, Duke University Press). Follow her @veronica_gago.

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Almost as soon as he took office, President Milei announced his austerity plans for Argentina, including devaluing the national currency and implementing deep cuts to the government’s budget, acknowledging his policies “would bring even more economic pain,” as Cholakian and her colleagues report in The New York Times.

Argentina has the world’s third-largest reserves of lithium, a mineral critical in fueling green electricity. But as Cholakian writes in Rest of the World, Milei wants to free up multinational corporations to export much of the country’s lithium, even as residents near one mine live off the grid.

Lithium mining has been controversial in Argentina since before Milei’s victory. In San Salvador de Jujuy, native people protest mining on their territory, on May 24, 2019.

Felix Malte Dorn / Shutterstock

Cholakian has also covered the struggle for justice in Chile, where — half a century after a CIA-supported coup — families are still searching for the remains of loved ones killed under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

In Argentina, artificial intelligence is helping parents find children abducted as babies by the military regime more than 40 years ago, by generating images of what those babies might look like today, Cholakian writes.

Why are Argentinian gig workers supporting Milei? Cholakian, along with co-author Facundo Iglesia, sorts this out.

Gago offers some clues, too. First published in Spanish in 2014, Neoliberalism from Below explored an intractable paradox of alternative economic practices in Argentina. The book offers an ethnographic account of La Salada market in Buenos Aires, where vendors openly sell counterfeit goods. Gago shows how marginal workers simultaneously resist and enable the global inequality that defines their opportunities.

After news leaked of Roe v. Wade’s impending demise in the United States, Gago argued that women’s rights advocates should turn to Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and elsewhere in the global south for a playbook on fighting back — with mass movements in the streets.

In A Feminist Reading of Debt, Gago and her co-author draw on interviews from Brazil and Argentina to show how the burdens of financial precarity fall unequally on women and LGBTQ people. And they suggest ways to counteract those burdens.

Jacobin interviewed Gago in 2022, two years after Latin America saw huge demonstrations on International Women’s Day as the covid pandemic was unfolding. She said the movement drew on three decades of transnational mobilization across groups like labor unions and the mothers of the disappeared.

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In 2020, abortion was decriminalized in Argentina, a predominantly Catholic country, largely on the force of a women’s movement that became known as the Green Wave. This woman demonstrates in support of the measure in Buenos Aires on Dec. 10 of that year — at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

Carolina Jaramillo / Shutterstock

In January, Argentina’s major labor unions led a nationwide strike in protest of Milei’s agenda. Now, in response to further cuts to the public sector — close to 15,000 workers were laid off — the country’s teachers union is calling for renewed stoppages.

Women’s groups are mobilizing against Milei as well. Thousands took the streets on March 8 in a feminist strike to protest his “anti-gender” politics; Milei has called abortion “aggravated murder.”

The new president also promotes denialism about abuses under Argentina’s military dictatorship, from 1976 and 1983, which unleashed a wave of state terror.

The United Nations would disagree. Last year, it placed a notorious torture prison from that era, Argentina’s former Navy School of Mechanics, on its list of World Heritage Sites. Known as ESMA, the site has been transformed into one of the world’s premiere memory museums.

An interior courtyard of the once infamous torture center of the Argentine military dictatorship is now part of a museum and memory project.

Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA

For his libertarian ideas to gain traction, Milei will have to contend with opposition from Argentina’s lawmakers. In mid-March senators again rejected a proposal that would have deregulated much of the economy, privatized state services and slashed even more spending. Earlier, the courts declared unconstitutional Milei’s plan to undercut workers rights like parental leave and severance pay.

The rise of Milei in Argentina is the latest in a string populist and right-wing political successes in Latin America. The Economist recently analyzed the region’s “new hard right,” which relishes in Trump-inspired rhetoric. El País has argued that this new alliance shares a commitment to roll back recent advances on gender equality.

Mothers and grandmothers have been the driving force behind efforts to remember and seek justice for the victims of state terror during the military dictatorship of Argentina from 1976 to 1983.

Laura Rivas / Shutterstock

Attendees of America’s Conservative Political Action Conference showered Milei with praise during his appearance at their annual gathering in February. Writing for NACLA, historian Steven Forti calls the world’s growing far-right movement “the greatest threat to democratic values and the very survival of pluralist liberal democracies today.”

What is neoliberalism anyway? First of all, don’t confuse it with liberal politics. Social scientist David Harvey explains what the term “neoliberalism” means and why its core supposition — free markets equal freedom — was badly shaken in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Writing for the New Yorker, essayist Louis Menand offers the alternative term “market fundamentalism” to understand the history of neoliberalism in the United States.

The Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein suggests that neoliberals never let a crisis go to waste. Instead, she says, it’s an opportunity for corporate profit by applying the kind of shock therapy Milei is pushing in Argentina.

Heard on the show

We used some recent news reels to set the stage on this episode, from CBS and the Associated Press.

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Transcript

Coming soon!