The “chainsaw”, as the cuts applied by President Javier Milei are known, has dismantled ministries, social aid centers and institutions, has paralyzed education, health and pensions, and has generated unemployment and poverty, a setback that It places Argentina at the antipodes of what it was in the past as a democratic reference.
During the campaign that led to victory to take office on December 10, 2023, Milei presented himself as an “anarcho-capitalist libertarian” and gained notoriety for his histrionic expressions.
No one forgets when, on a television program, he furiously tore papers from a board with the names of the ministries, shouting: “out, out.” It was the harbinger of what was to come.
After settling in the Casa Rosada, he began to fulfill his promises: he reduced the ministries from eighteen to nine, carried out layoffs, devalued the currency, ended subsidies and aid, and vetoed the increase in pensions and the university financing law.
Milei attacked retirees and the educational sector, two untouchables in Argentine history.
Between December 2023 and August 2024, 180,000 jobs were lost: 52,000 in the public sector and 128,000 in the private sector, according to a report from the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Unemployment and inflation, which reached 193% year-on-year last October, raised poverty to 52%.
impoverished middle class
“Before I traveled to Europe, to Asia. I have had to sell the 10,000 dollars I had saved to make ends meet,” Alejandro Sosa, a business administrator and example of the new impoverished middle class, tells EFE.
The director of Amnesty International (AI) in Argentina, Mariela Belsky, explains to EFE that before Milei “the State employed a lot of people, subsidized a lot of people, public works, programs linked to the gender, diversity, adults agenda” and “They were all reduced, they were cut, they were suspended.”
Regarding the impact, doctor Mabel Bianco, specialized in public health, warns EFE that in the case of children “that poverty of 52% rises to more than 60%, and in addition destitution has increased. It is extreme poverty and the Women and children are the most affected.”
Bianco explains the consequences: “These children who are not eating, or are eating once a day – when there is a school or community cafeteria – are going to have a mental and psychosocial deficit (…). We are becoming poorer in the future, that It is the most serious thing.”
Medicines are missing
Another decision that Milei adopted was to leave programs managed by the Government in the hands of the provincial administrations, but without providing them with funds.
“Education and health are local jurisdiction, but the provinces had their own funds and transfer funds for co-participation. Milei limits these transfers and local governments are forced to adjust,” explains Belsky.
Bianco adds that the Government has stopped executing the budget and is delaying the purchases of health supplies – which are the responsibility of the State -, given that the budgets that Milei wants to approve are going to cut these items even more.
“We don’t have oncology, a frightening irregularity. There are problems with the provision of antiretrovirals (…). We are not having contraceptives, supplies as fundamental as condoms. We have difficulties with basic first aid kits, medications for diarrhea, pneumonia, bronchiolitis,” he adds.
Rights and democracy
According to the director of AI, “there is a very important denial of the human rights agendas, of the 2030 Agenda, of the climate crisis (…). They have closed a lot of programs linked to diversity, they have removed trans quotas (state jobs for this group), the same with disabilities.”
And he issues a warning: “There is great censorship and limitation of freedom of expression towards journalists, civil society, people who think differently (…). “Those who question the Government are publicly demonized and delegitimized.”
According to Belsky, “there is a very important setback in rights” in a context in which “the Government is emboldened and the opposition is disarmed.”
The director of the Latin American Strategic Center for Geopolitics (Celag), Alfredo Serrano, agrees that Milei “has a model of regression in rights in the broadest sense of the word; When he talks about the withdrawal of the State he is saying withdrawal of rights”.
“He talks about freedom with many fallacies (…), he tries to transform the common senses of Argentina, to make society metabolize this decline in rights, which it believes is natural,” he indicates.
Despite everything, Argentina has “a very strong progressive matrix” and, although Milei tries, “the battle has not been won,” concludes Serrano.
