The Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata was a political-territorial entity established by the Spanish Crown in the Americas as an integral part of the Spanish Empire from 1776 to 1810, with the port of Buenos Aires as its capital. And 214 years later, an ultra-right-wing president seems to want to re-establish it in Argentina as Mileinato, now dependent on Western powers and large transnational corporations.
Reality shows that Javier Milei’s “all or nothing” approach is holding up his plan to dismantle the Argentine state, and he is once again threatening to make the dollar legal tender, thereby surrendering monetary sovereignty, which would be subject to the decisions of the United States.
The short honeymoon period is over. The national survey carried out in February 2024 by the Zubán-Córdoba consultancy shows that President Milei’s confrontation with the governors and the cut in funding is provoking strong rejection, with 61.8% believing that dialogue is the way forward. His popularity has also fallen: 53% think the country is going in the wrong direction. The economy remains the weakest flank, with more than half of respondents blaming Milei for the current crisis.
After the ruling party failed to pass the Omnibus Law in the Chamber of Deputies, Milei is trying to meet with former president Mauricio Macri to form a coalition government between the far-right La Libertad Avanza and the neoliberal Republican Proposal (PRO).
Mauricio Macri, El Ángel Exterminador, and President Javier Milei, El Menem Trucho, are about to commit the ultimate political fraud, inspired by the worst electoral misrepresentation,” said writer Jorge Asís in his account on the social network X. “The government is trying to control inflation with the neoliberal Republican Proposal (PRO).
At the same time, it is trying to control inflation by deepening the recession (which means impoverishing the majority of the population), which could curb inflation at the cost of reducing the purchasing power of a large part of society to a minimum, in a country where hunger is felt throughout the territory.
After visiting the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, dancing with the rabbis, and holding a long dialogue with Pope Francis – whom he described as “the representative of evil” – Milei devoted his first days to polemics with two women: former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and singer Lali Espósito, while the public scene seemed to be shared by the ultra-right leader and former presidents Mauricio Macri and Cristina Fernández.
And now he will receive the head of US diplomacy, Antony Blinken, in Buenos Aires as part of his visit to the region, which will also take him to Rio de Janeiro to attend the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting.
With 12 million followers on Instagram and seven million on TikTok, Lali Espósito is one of the most followed young people in the country. All that remains for Milei to do is challenge football star Lionel Messi unless he chooses only female opponents.
Milei keeps his opponents amused with a project that is not on his immediate agenda. In the secret meeting between Milei and the head of the Buenos Aires government, the neoliberal Jorge Macri, in Rome, they analyzed the plans of the economic team and the reasons for the fall of the parallel dollar.
Alejandro Bercovich points out that a video by Steve Forbes, whose surname is associated with the list of the world’s millionaires but who has no influence on the global establishment, was enough to give the Argentine leadership the phantasmagorical idea that Javier Milei was capable of dollarising the economy before the middle of the year.
The phantom has been effective in enthusing businessmen and alarming opposition leaders, who have still not recovered from the crushing slap in the face they received at the polls. The transfer of the December devaluation to prices and the dizzying liquefaction of salaries, pensions, and savings, with much more physical consequences for the majority of the population, were put on the back burner.
Macri was silent… and Cristina spoke.
A week ago, an agreement between Milei and Macri was almost certain, but it seems to have remained only in the president’s wishes. Macri knows that the first thing he has to do is to reorganize the party he founded more than two decades ago, bringing together all the different parts into which it has been divided. A difficult task, with egos to contend with.
Some of Milei’s cronies spoke of a power-sharing agreement, but Macri is not even talking about it. The possibility seems to be reduced to parliamentary and ideological support for the general progress of some (not all) of the executive’s proposals, and perhaps suggesting some names for certain positions.
The calculation is simple: if the government does well after the agreement, the success will be entirely Milei’s, which would leave the PRO in the background. If the government fails to control inflation and the social and political crisis worsens, a coalition government would drag Macrismo into the crisis.
Cristina Fernández has once again demonstrated her political time management, a calculated administration of silence and words. Although she is a permanent target of the government’s diatribes, she shows that she is a protagonist even when she is silent. Now he has woken up the political class with his views on the sad reality.
Some criticized the document presented by the former president for its tone and form, others for its diagnosis and proposals, some for the balance of the last government in which she was vice-president of the forgettable president Alberto Fernández, but only the government spoke of the “timing”, the moment it chose to intervene.
The moment she chose was precisely when the government of the ultra-rightist Javier Milei was moving towards an alliance, even a merger, with the neo-liberals of Propuesta Republicana (PRO), the party of former president Mauricio Macri, led by the current security minister, Patricia Bullrich.
In her letter, Cristina, amid the disarray of Peronism without clear ideas or leadership, makes it clear that the main enemy is Macri (with policies and equipment to govern) and considers Milei as a disputed territory. Some analysts dared to suggest that Cristina was proposing a coalition for Milei, an alternative to Macri’s proposal.
Cristina recalled the neoliberal government of Mauricio Macri and the “capture of the judiciary”, pointing out that he used the “mafia method: espionage, threats, and persecution through the judicialization of politics”. The aim is to “stigmatize and disappear the opponent, not physically as in the dictatorship, but politically”.
The collapse of the rule of law was “not a harmless process, it ended up seriously conditioning the system of democratic political representation in Argentina, with consequences that continue to this day”, he recalled.
In her letter, the two-time president and recent vice-president describe economic and political cycles in which several post-dictatorship presidents have been indulged and subtly relieved of their political responsibilities. However, the Argentine reality shows that there were no neoliberal and other anti-neoliberal cycles, which nevertheless maintained the conditions of foreign debt, privatization, labor reforms, and the progressive privatization of the economy.
It is worth remembering that during her government, Cristina lost her social base thanks to misguided policies, having won 54 percent of the vote in 2011.
Something is surprising in her letter, and that is the absence of references to the people and popular mobilization, forgetting the social outburst of 2001 that finally brought Néstor Kirchner to power and the mobilizations of December 2017, the beginning of the end of Macri’s government. Nor did she criticize the repressive protocol of Patricia Bullrich and Milei, who shot at the popular mobilization in front of Congress when the government’s Omnibus Law was ruled out.
Cristina gave a nod to privatizations, pointing out that it was necessary to “consider the creation or transformation of companies in the form of a virtuous public-private partnership, as was done with YPF before it was denationalized”. For some analysts on the left, Cristina will propose a nuanced program to Milei (or to the “reformists” of the officialism that makes up Peronism and Radicalism) (against dollarisation or the budget deficit), but in favor of privatizations, labor reform, the regimentation of education and greater penal control.
In her public letter, Cristina Kirchner denounced that this drama is the result of believing that the budget deficit is the only – or the main – cause of inflation and that the consequences of this thinking have led to the adjustments and this picture of great injustice, where the majority of the population has fallen below the poverty line and lost access to housing, food, health, and education.
Meanwhile, the main workers’ union, the CGT, defined the situation in the country as a “social drama”, while the government celebrated having achieved a budget surplus in January with an inflation of more than 46 percent – only in its first two months in office – with frozen salaries and pensions, without supplying thousands of soup kitchens, and with increases of 300 and 400 percent in services and public transport.
Milei looks the other way
In this dispute, Milei said that Cristina Kirchner’s writing was precarious and deflected the debate with outrageous indignation against Lali Espósito. On this point, he removed her to his advantage, using communication codes that have served him well in his career. Milei is not interested in the disproportion between the president’s attack on an artist who has spoken out in defense of culture.
But the attack was not casual: Milei took on Lali Espósito because that is how he reaches a wider audience than the political one, without worrying about the consequences that the singer might have for this attack. The troll farms and network operators began to attack with virulence, using personal defamation, and lies that massed thousands of fake accounts, trying to create an inertia that captured the hateful and unwary, until they created a trend.
An investigation by the journalist Ivy Cángaro has shown that at the center of this machinery is the Madero Group, led by Fernando Cerimedo, a publicist who makes no secret of his sympathies for the gothic ultra-right. Cerimedo’s communication apparatus is supported by that of Steve Bannon, the ultra-right Trumpist who has successfully installed on social networks the poisonous and antisocial language on which these ultra-reactionary figures are fed.
De-Malvinising
British Chancellor David Cameron will visit the Falkland Islands to reject the possibility of a sovereignty claim by the current government. The two men met in Davos, where the President confirmed that they had held a cordial dialogue discussing the disputed territory.
“We want to find a workable solution to the Falklands. England had a similar conflict: it was with China and over the case of Hong Kong. We will propose a similar solution, in which England will return the islands to us through diplomatic channels,” said Milei, who also insisted on “taking into account the interests of the people who live on the islands”.
Guillermo Carmona, former Secretary for the Malvinas, Antarctica, and the South Atlantic at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs pointed out that the policy of the Milei-Villarruel government on the Malvinas question “is the one that best suits the United Kingdom: complicit silence on the question of sovereignty, failure to act and take a position in the face of colonial provocations and unilateral actions in the South Atlantic”.
He pointed out that if the abandonment of diplomatic activism on the Malvinas issue is consolidated, Argentina will suffer an enormous setback in its persistent action to recover the full exercise of sovereignty over the territories illegally usurped by the United Kingdom. It seems that the Mileinato is playing for the enemy.
