The Javier Milei and Victoria Villarruel ticket came to power under the new right-wing party La Libertad Avanza, with support from the center-right Cambiemos coalition. This administration represents a turning point in political, economic, and social realms. Notably, it marks a rupture in the agenda of memory, truth, and justice. Moreover, it poses a significant attack on Argentina’s welfare state, which, although weakened, stands out in the region for its public health and education services.
Since 1983, Argentina has undertaken a process of building memory, truth, and justice for the crimes against humanity committed during the last dictatorship (1976–1983). This process has become a beacon of comprehensive policies that include prosecuting and punishing those responsible for mass crimes committed during the dictatorship, declassifying and surveying military and security archives, incorporating critical studies of state terrorism into the educational curriculum, providing reparations to victims, searching for babies and children abducted during the dictatorship, and repurposing sites linked to repression as memorial sites.
In stark contrast to this history, the new government promotes a culture of disdain for the process of memory, truth, and justice, seeking to place the country in opposition to what has been built in democracy under various governments with the commitment of all branches of the state. These policies are being undermined by a combination of general budget cuts, defunding, and the deliberate dismantling of structures for political reasons.
The current Vice President, Villarruel is the daughter and granddaughter of military officers. Her father was active during the dictatorship. She is an activist defending those responsible for crimes against humanity. In her social and political work, she discredits the human rights movement, lauding the actions of the armed forces throughout the dictatorship. Both Javier Milei, his vice president, Security Minister Patricia Bullrich, and other top officials characterize the trials for crimes against humanity as acts of harassment and humiliation toward the armed forces, describe memory and human rights education policies as indoctrination, regard reparation policies as a “scam” by human rights organizations and victims’ collectives, and label the declassification of military archives as “parastatal actions.” This approach seeks, depending on the moment, to deny, justify, or even vindicate the military’s actions during the dictatorship, to legitimize harassment toward the human rights movement, and to endorse state violence in the present.
The dissemination of these messages—on social media and in government acts—has effects beyond the administration: there is an increase in the vandalization of memory sites, and retired military officers even held a commemorative event at a clandestine detention center from the dictatorship—the emblematic Navy Mechanics School—with the Ministry of Defense’s endorsement.
The range of causes this government rejects and disparages is much broader. Although they came to power with a mix of disparate and even contradictory ideological currents, these different factions agree in rejecting movements for the expansion of rights such as feminism, social and labor movements, the LGTBIQ+ community, environmental movements, anti-racist demands, and the ancestral claims of Indigenous peoples over their territories.
As seen in countries where the far-right has come to power, such as Brazil and the United States, their rhetoric frames these rights movements and their achievements as part of a global problem with local manifestations, positioning the government to correct these deviations. On this basis, they advocate for dismantling public social safety nets, claiming that the market is the most efficient—and just, they say—allocator of resources.
It is challenging to pinpoint a single cause for the rise of these political projects worldwide and in Argentina. We might consider that as progressive or center-left governments in the region exhausted their ability to respond effectively to everyday needs and life projects, those unmet demands and discontent—exacerbated by the social and generational experience of the pandemic—fueled a right-wing reaction.
A new global wave of reactionary radicalism has pragmatically and effectively aligned with old conservatisms that longed for “military order,” the persistence of the traditional family, and the silencing of the biggest “losers” of the neocolonialisms that shaped our nation in the early 20th century: Indigenous people, the poor, workers, rural masses distant from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires. These are the coordinates that strongly appear in Milei’s historical references to a supposed glorious past for Argentina: our South American version of Trump’s MAGA.
The libertarian experiment in Argentina is being closely watched by the international community. Its success could signal a tone of greater radicalization, ushering in a second cycle of far-right governments. This forms part of a transnational alliance “in defense of the West,” with the United States and Israel as main references, but also with significant alliances in Europe, notably with the Spanish and Hungarian right-wing.
It must be noted that positions on the dictatorship and the legitimization of state violence serve the current security and defense stances. Increased threats and repressive measures are reflected in the new police protocol that authorizes the use of high-toxicity gases against anyone obstructing public roads as part of a protest. In these six months of government, protests by social movements, laid-off public workers, retirees, leftist and Peronist activists, and cultural program defenders have already been repressed. Recently, in the province of Misiones, the national government even deployed federal security forces to quell teachers and police officers protesting for wage increases, as their salaries are below the poverty line.
It is worth noting that in each of these protests, police severely injured journalists and media workers covering the events. This fits into a broader strategy of attacking press freedom and the public’s right to information, as seen with the closure of Télam, the public news agency that provided federal and national journalistic coverage. Following its closure, the mentioned protest in Misiones was mainly reported by independent press and through the protesters’ own records.
The Argentine president is scheduled to visit Germany in late June. The highlight of his visit will be the award he will receive from the neoliberal Friedrich August von Hayek Society , honoring him as one of the most faithful exponents of the Austrian School of Economics for combining extreme individualism with a blind trust in the regulatory power of the market. Since Milei took office, poverty in Argentina has ascended to 55.5% of the population, and extreme poverty to 17.5%. Concurrently, while social protection measures are being cut and their reach is inadequate, the government is pushing for tax reductions for the country’s wealthiest sectors. In this context, applying the doctrines of Mises and Hayek without mediation closely resembles cruelty. It is within the power of the international community to draw attention to this lack of empathy.
Published in German on the Heinrich Böll Stiftung website.
Photo: Maria Eugenia Cerruti / CELS