International

Argentina: Milei in Decline and Struggles on the Rise

Every March 24, the Argentine people have an appointment with their history. It has been 49 years since that fateful March 24, 1976, in which the country woke up with the troops in the streets and the weak government of Isabel Perón was overthrown by force of arms.

by Jokin Mendizábal

A dictatorship never seen before, for its repressive methods, based above all on the disappearance of people, and for its intensity and depth had just begun its bloody journey. Thirty thousand detained-tortured-disappeared were going to pay the price for having challenged the established power with ideas of equality and social justice.

The marches or demonstrations remembering that coup d’état, which in Buenos Aires had their concentration point in the Plaza de Mayo, came from different parts of the city. The largest of all came from the ESMA (Navy School of Mechanics), a former centre of detention, torture and disappearance of people from the 1976 dictatorship, today transformed into a “Space for Memory and for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights”.

This centre is 15 km from the Plaza de Mayo and that distance is travelled by a huge crowd every year to go to their appointment with the people mobilised for NEVER AGAIN, for Memory, Truth and Justice. Something that is in serious danger with the current Milei government.

In the Plaza they will meet with the rest of the left-wing parties and the “national and popular” camp. This year, there was for the first time in many years a call to mobilise by the CGT leadership, which has also called for a general strike for April 10, which gives an idea of the atmosphere of protest that has been rising as a result of the constant attacks received by the people from the government.

Already in the Plaza, overflowing with attendees and to close the event, a statement was read by the Mothers and Grandmothers accompanied by the Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. It is Taty Almeida, the president of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo-Founding Line, who puts into words what that crowd represents. “We have the strength of the history of our people, and that is why (Javier) Milei and (Victoria) Villarruel (the vice president) intend to deny the genocide and dismantle the conquests in matters of Memory, Truth and Justice.”

At his side, Estela de Carlotto (President of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo) nods. The women who defied the bloodiest dictatorship are now also defying a government that trivialises crimes and provokes them, but this time they are not alone. This is the message that the crowd leaves with its presence in the commemoration of the 49 years since the coup d’état.

Youth bring their music and energy

At the time of the rally on Hipólito Irigoyen Street, on the corner of 9 de Julio, there was a rock concert, the kid who was on top of a home-made trailer with black flags on which was painted “Out with deniers” shouted “Self-managed Rock” and among the groups that sang was “La Bella Época” who sang a song of their own entitled “Pañuelos Blancos” in clear allusion to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.

On another street, Tacuarí and Rivadavia, “La mona suelta” a murga group sang “Conan, Conan, we are governed by Conan“, “we want to see Conan” (referring to one of the four dogs that Milei says he has, but that no one has seen, and that is already a subject of mockery by everyone, because among other things Conan was a dog that Milei had but that died and Milei had him cloned in the United States with which, according to the president, he speaks).

Such was the force that was breathed among the youth sectors that the journalist Luis Brunchtein said, with words that capture better than anyone that atmosphere, that “is not a force that is generated out of nothing or by the sum of hundreds of thousands of people.

“It is the strength of those hundreds of thousands superpowered by the symbolic, moral and courageous force of the historical struggle of the Mothers until their last breath, in all circumstances, in the face of all injustices. It is the treasure that the Mothers offer as an inheritance, the example of their struggles.”

The cowardly revenge of those who vindicate dictatorship

The day after this magnificent demonstration of force and repudiation of the dictatorship that, more than ever in these 42 years of democracy, is threatened, the government ordered the demolition of the sculpture in homage to Osvaldo Bayer, author, among other exemplary books, of La Patagonia Rebelde, which reconstructs the history of the struggle of the peasants in the province of Santa Cruz in 1921, where more than 1500 strikers were murdered. Where, by the way, the first disappeared people in Argentina took place.

Today there has already been a wave of protests and different acts of protest have been called that will make many who did not know those events now know them as well as the author of La Patagonia Rebelde. “My father was censored in life, his books were burned, he suffered exile and prison, but he would never have imagined a bulldozer that intends to erase his name,” said Osvaldo Bayer’s son.

The local government of Río Gallegos, the city where the monument was, has already announced that it will place the monument in another place. “In the face of this attempt by the National Government to erase the history of the people of Santa Cruz and Patagonia, we have made the decision to restore the monument to Osvaldo Bayer and Rebel Patagonia. Because we are rebels by nature,” said Mayor Pablo Grasso.

Sources close to government recognise Milei’s policy has failed

The hatred that this government professes for the Argentine working people is not from now, but is fed by the historical hatred bequeathed by those landowners and oligarchs of the 19th and early 20th centuries so longed for in their speeches by Milei.

Today we must add to the hatred the despair over the failure of his economic policy. The self-perceived “growth specialist, with or without money“, is not only failing to grow, but the economy is plummeting. Deregulation Minister Federico Sturzenegger is telling Luis Caputo, economy minister, to lift the “exchange clamp” (a series of restrictions and controls imposed by the government to limit the buying and selling of foreign currency, especially U.S. dollars. These measures are implemented to control the flight of foreign currency from the country and stabilize the economy).

The agreement with the IMF that the government is negotiating has not yet materialised because there are still things under discussion such as the government’s control over the exchange rate with the dollar, which is currently very low, which allows the purchase and flight of dollars by the speculators.

Milei is squandering the reserves in dollars and in any case the dollar has begun a bullish race that is in enormous danger for the weak and misnamed “stability”. The government has squandered the 20,000 million dollars obtained from money laundering that it allowed last September, plus the scarce reserves of the state. Several times they have announced that the agreement with the IMF was already in place but the agreement is not. In the best case scenario, the IMF will lend 20,000 million dollars to Argentina, of which it owes 14,000 million, which of course will only be seen in the accounting entries.

In short, we are on the eve of a deepening of the crisis that has already been falling for 15 months in consumption, production, wages and in almost all economic indicators.

A new stage is opening in Argentine politics and mobilisations such as Monday’s, the transport strike called for Friday, March 28, the general strike on April 10 allow us to think optimistically.

From the website porelsocialismo, original here, Translated through Microsoft Edge.