Newsletter 03/2024
Three disastrous months
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Three months after the inauguration of the rightwing extremist Javier Milei as President of Argentina, the government insists on promoting non-consensual measures with a direct impact on the most vulnerable sectors The country’s already staggering levels of inflation have more than doubled since Milei came to power, now sitting at around 25% per month, representing the world’s highest inflation rate, 60% of Argeninians now live below the poverty line. With wages largely stagnating and unemployment on the rise following large-scale layoffs in the public sector, the government has slashed or frozen federal subsidies for services, transport, health and education, resulting in monthly tariff hikes of more than 200% for water, 150% for electricy, and more than 200% for public transport, measures that disproportionately hit the poorest of society. Health insurance costs have risen 110–120% on average, and the government has suspended distribution of vital medication even to cancer patients and others with chronic illnesses, putting their very lives at risk. Public universities have warned that they will run out of funding as soon as May after having their funds cut by more than 200%, cultural institutions including the news agency Télam and the National Film Institute, serving a world-class industry that provides jobs for over 70,000 people, have been trashed or are threatened with closure and sell-off of their assets. Meanwhile, Milei –a former TV provocateur and online influencer rising to fame for his delirious, invective-ridden conspiracy theories and eccentric roamings about his past live among circus lions in ancient Rome– spends his time insulting and threatening opponents on social media, making fun of children with Down syndrome while closing down the State Agency against discrimination, and frolicking with rightwing extremists in Israel and Italy, while police are giving free reign in repressing protests since a new anti-street blockade protocol came into effect. Although a wide-ranging “Omnibus Law” suspending environmental protections, restrictions on land sales to foreign corporations, and international treaties about Indigenous land rights, as well as making the right to protest subject to prior government approval, remains stuck in Congress, many of these measures have already been illegally pushed through by presidential decree, which remains in power because the government refuses to allow the Senate (the legislative body entrusted with confirming or turning down decrees) to enter into session. Some economists speculate that Milei and his establishment enablers deliberately seek to plunge Argentina into a crisis that will force it to abandon its national currency, and thus also foreclose any reconstruction in the future of economic and political self-determination: a perspective that its oligopolic, agro-industrial elite seems entirely comfortable with. International suitors are already lining up like vultures circling around a fresh corpse to reap the benefits of access at sell-off prices to the country’s lithium, oil and gas reserves; the likes of Elon Musk and of Germany’s “traffic-light coalition” apparently the first in line to make their pick.
Science, education and culture
In a letter published on March 6, 2024, 68 Nobel Prize-winning scientists from different countries around the world expressed their concern with the unprecedented attack on university research: “We fear that Argentina is abandoning its scientists, students and future leaders of science. We are concerned that the dramatic devaluation of the budgets of CONICET and the National Universities reflects not only a dramatic devaluation of Argentine science but also a devaluation of the Argentine people and the future of Argentina,” they point out and conclude: “Without an infrastructure for science , a country falls into helplessness and vulnerability, without developing its own technology to advance, nor training people or developing the necessary infrastructure to apply the scientific and technological knowledge of others to regional, national and local problems. Where would a situation like that leave Argentina?” [Read more]
More than 500 historians in Argentina (with more than 200 supporters from all over the world) have signed a letter that “points out the danger that our society is in” with “the hatred that advances” led by Milei. “Forty years after the end of the last dictatorship,” they point out, “we run the risk that democracy will no longer be the improvable system to build life in common. With his politics, Javier Milei puts the founding pact of 1983 at risk.” Read the full text. Add your signature.
From Argentina, scientists Micaela Moreira and Valeria Edelsztein shared with us the “Defensa STEM Argentina” initiative that compiles expressions of solidarity from scientists around the world in defense of university research and against the dismantling of CONICET. Messages of support can be seen on YouTube and X (Twitter). Contributions can be sent to: DefensaSTEMargentina@gmail.com
Human Rights
With the return to the security portfolio of Patricia Bullrich, responsible for the area during the government of Mauricio Macri and promoter of the “Chocobar doctrine” authorizing police forces to shoot suspected criminals from behind without prior warning, police violence and the risk of criminalization of social protest have increased, as warns the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS). Meanwhile, the new government has begun to appoint active and retired military personnel to strategic positions in the Chief of Staff, the Federal Intelligence Agency and the Ministry of Defense, and has appointed a retired colonel to direct the Malvinas Museum, located on the grounds of the former ESMA concentration camp. In Misiones, a repressor convicted of crimes against humanity during the last civil-military dictatorship (including the “Margarita Belén Massacre” in which at least 22 people were tortured and murdered in Chaco) and who had been released conditional as soon as Milei took office, he was honored in a military regiment, without any reaction from the Armed Forces or the Ministry of Defense.
First Nations
We express our deep concern about the threat of dispossession of the ancestral territories of the Guaraní Yariguarenda Community of the Guaraní People, located in the town of Tartagal, in the Province of Salta, northern Argentina. The Yariguarenda community is registered with legal status №0213 and has the territorial survey of Law 26160, which identifies it as ancestral Indigenous territory. However, those who inhabit these lands of the Community are under a growing threat of expropriation for the benefit of tourist ventures, in the face of a government that has not articulated any type of action to claim these communities and their territorial rights.
On December 18, 2023, the Argentine National Bank proceeded with a judicial auction of the territory ancestrally occupied by this community, as compensation for a debt related to a lawsuit initiated in 1996 against one of the registered owners, Francisco Martínez.
This territorial dispossession is framed in a context of neoliberal policies and denial of ethnic-racial rights by the government in power, which have perpetuated the vulnerability of indigenous communities to economic and business interests. Despite this, the community has resisted and continues to inhabit its territories, producing agroecological foods and generating community rural tourism projects. Faced with the auction, the community has filed a collective protection action, obtaining the suspension of the sale by the Federal Court of Tartagal, which recognizes the indigenous right to the territories and orders to protect the cultural continuity and the very life of the community.
To express your support of the Guaraní Yariguarenda Community, please visit this form: https://forms.gle/BwVcP4V17G9cr3W79
Environment
Different social and environmental organizations have denounced the Government’s attempt to regressively modify the Glacier Law, in order to expand the peri-glacial areas accessible to mining. The “Omnibus Law,” which also contained similar modifications to the Forest Law, defunding state control of clearing and intentional fires as well as delegating to provincial authorities the power to authorize clearing even in protected biodiversity areas, was returned to committees after the rejection of several of its articles in the Chamber of Deputies. However, as Greenpeace warns, these and other measures proposed by the government “put at serious risk the future of vital ecosystems to confront the current climate and biodiversity crisis” and represent an “unacceptable regression of won environmental rights.” [Read analysis]
Gender and LGTBQ+ rights
On March 8, on Working Women’s Day, the Milei government decided to change the name of the “Women’s Hall” of the Government House into the “Hall of the Heroes” and to replace the portraits of Mercedes Sosa, María Elena Walsh, Eva Perón, Hebe de Bonafini and Lohana Berkins by those of Juan Bautista Alberdi, Julio Argentino Roca and Carlos Menem, among others. That same day, a multitude of transfeminist and LGTB+ activists came out to defend throughout Argentina the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion and the Gender Identity Law, in addition to protesting against the closure of the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity, now demoted to the rank of Undersecretariat for Protection against Gender Violence. Milei himself, in a speech given just two days before 8M, had referred to the voluntary interruption of pregnancy as “aggravated murder” and a representative from his party tried without success to present a project to criminalize abortion. At the same time, as reported by the Observatory of Femicide in Argentina “Adriana Marisel Zambrano”, the number of femicides in the country continues to increase compared to the previous year. “Enough of extractivism against bodies and territories!” concludes the document of the 8M organizations: “We were a tide, and we will be a tsunami!” [Read full text]
Publications and interventions from Observatorio Argentino members
Andrés del Río, “Milei e os ataques à cultura: implementando o roteiro da extrema direita”, Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil, 29–02–2024
Andrés del Río, “A violência discursiva de Javier Milei”, A terra é redonda, 12–03–2024
Events and activities by Observatorio Argentino
Preconference “Argentina en foco: seis meses de gestión libertaria” (virtual and in-person), Bogotá, Colombia, 11 June 2024. Observatorio Argentino in collaboration with LASA Sección Cono Sur. Program — Inscription
Observatorio Argentino is a self-convened group of academics, intellectuals and culture and communication workers on five continents concerned with social justice, human rights and education and science in Argentina. To get in touch or to join the group, please send us an email to: argentinoobservatorio@gmail.com
