Listen to this note:
It will most likely take years to reverse the total damage that the government has done. Javier Milei produce for Argentina and its people. At the end of May 2024, the South American president will visit one of the most important technological lobbies on the planet: Silicon Valley in California, paired on the official agenda with a landing in El Salvador to participate in the inauguration of Nayib Bukele as re-elected president.
The darkest sides of the Latin American right, of course, are allied because their agenda is the same.
Faithful to his discourse that free capitalism is the panacea of humanity, Milei seeks to give the image that what he proposes for Argentina is innovation, technological development, inventiveness through commitment to semiconductors, enriching investment, when in fact he is articulating the old traditional surrender of Latin America in favor of the Western powers; forcing citizens to blow their dollars - popular forms of protection against inflationary instability, already permanent in the country for years -; mounting a media circus that, through Vice President Victoria Villarruel or presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni, ridicules the struggles of the left, contemporary and historical, and forces millions to pay poverty wages, starvation, who have already advanced their protest in the province of Misiones, in the northeast of Argentina, on the border with Paraguay.
Just this June, the president completes six months at the head of the Casa Rosada, a very brief period that, however, has given him the opportunity to schedule flights to Israel, the United States or Spain, not to mention the diplomatic crises that his hasty verbosity has earned him with Mexico, Colombia or Moncloa itself.
The Chilean poet Armando Uribe, in addition to composing verses, was a jurist and thinker of the legal frameworks of his country, built as a result of a project for a nation independent of European colonialism.
As a result, he also became a critic in the face of evidence that the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship not only betrayed Salvador Allende and the Chilean popular vote, but also sought to dismantle republican laws to promote a State without a State, a mere administration of business impulses.
This is Milei's dream: to reiterate that all of Argentina's misfortunes lie in the sense of the public, the social, the beneficial. And, more than as a head of state, to behave as a manager of investments and dialogues with companies that aspire to profit even from the imaginary of the planet, to manage the issuance of dreams.
Milei does not seek to listen to citizens and meet with the needs of the street, but with the managers of the new extractivism, who talk about green economies to carry out the same plundering of the past, now perhaps focused on lithium, not on fossil fuels - and only partially.
Thus, the South American president is more interested in a photo with Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk than in the fate of the millions of Argentines challenged by current spending, who see how their bills are worth practically nothing, or the thousands of ignored people who crowd the anonymous corners of Buenos Aires to sleep nothing more than on the street.
The central challenge of the times in the largest Spanish-speaking country in South America, however, lies in the desperation of its voters.
While political analysis regrets that Milei does not have the stature of a head of state, the Argentinean on the street, in his daily work, in his taxi, in his small business, as a waiter, or in the informal sale of socks on the sidewalk, is tired of the formalistic promises of professional politics. He is tired of the feeling that Peronism - the most visible electoral opposition to Milei - speaks of patience, of waiting, of prudence, while its protagonists (Sergio Massa, Alberto Fernández) for better or worse do not suffer the suffocation that does anguish the anonymous. And Milei's voter does not want to do political philosophy, but rather to try out an urgent change to the state of things that will allow some relief to their already prolonged social agony.
This was well exploited by the same old business interests (I'm writing this on a Google Sheet), which capitalizes on legitimate discontent with a useful fool, a circus performer, a scandal-loving Twitter user who advances the tremors of the distracting spectacle while the United States seeks a strategic military base in the sovereign Tierra del Fuego, to put us in the sticky situation of some of the ideas spilled out so far. And in just six months, I said.
And while there are strong and clear social sectors, such as the memory fighters, the students, the indigenous groups of Mendoza, the teachers or the employees of the Misiones police, who with varying intensity raise their voices against what they consider unacceptable swings in the Argentine executive, the truth is that the underlying economic desperation is real and continuous among millions, and the hope that, although ridiculous, a political-style change of direction will bring some freshness to daily life still seems far from fading in the Argentine sentiment. “Argentina will recover,” they trust.
Until the disappointment that rejects the arrogance of the traveling head of state with political articulation arrives, the global business community will continue to advance its usual agenda in a country that is so rich, so rich, that they plunder it and plunder it and plunder it, and it never ends.
When the circus ends its programme of spheres and vuvuzelas, reversing the damage will take years. And the left will have had to learn the lesson of listening to the concrete needs of citizens, before bibliographic speculation.
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