On a pedestrian street in the center of Buenos Aires, a man holding onto a microphone divulges to about thirty people the differences between journalism and X, or what until recently was Twitter. He explains to them, for example, that public media are more necessary than ever to counter the fake news that spreads on social networks in times of crisis. Like during the pandemic, or a few days ago, before a tremendous peak of dengue that the Argentine capital was suffering, when a cloud of mosquitoes covered Buenos Aires and finding repellent was practically impossible.

The divulger was a journalist from Télam and spoke a few meters from some fences that prevent entry to one of the two headquarters in Buenos Aires of the Argentine public agency, which the country’s president, Javier Milei, believes is useless. “Twitter is faster than Télam,” said YouTuber and legislator from his party Ramiro Marra, after the announcement of the closure of the first agency in the country and the second largest in Spanish behind Efe.

In his eagerness to get rid of everything public, Milei – who, like his admired Donald Trump, is a voracious consumer of X – came to the conclusion that Argentina does not need a news agency. In her inauguration message for the new period of ordinary sessions in Congress, she ratified her intention to close Télam and argued that it was used “during the last decades as a Kirchnerist propaganda agency.”

Two days later, the police arrived to put up the fences at midnight on Sunday, when the last shifts were leaving. That same day, the 760 Télam employees received an email explaining that they were excused from work for seven days. Since then, a message appears on Télam’s website saying that it is under reconstruction. Reporters cannot access the header where they uploaded the teletypes and photographs, nor do the 800 subscribed media outlets now receive the news. “There are people who still have their personal belongings in their drawers and cannot pick them up,” laments an experienced journalist.

A large part of Argentines think that Milei has kept his promise and has effectively closed the agency, without knowing that, despite all this, the workers continue to receive their salary every month even if they cannot work. “In its campaign to go against everything public, Télam is a symbol for society,” said Andrea Delfino, the delegate of the Buenos Aires Press Union in Télam, one of the agency workers who take turns 24 hours a day to maintain permanent mobilization in the two closed headquarters of the media. Not only to protest Milei’s measures, but also to protect their things and the agency’s photographic archive, one of its greatest treasures, when this weekend marks 79 years since its founding in 1945.

“Democracy was developing the tools to protect public media so that they did not depend on the individual decision of someone who becomes president,” says Delfino. Therefore, to close Télam, Milei needs a majority that she does not have.” So far, and more than a month has passed, the Executive’s official plan to close the public agency is unknown. Nor has it carried out any instrument or legal regulation that makes the closure official, beyond the announcement in Congress and police intervention. The only thing they have done is offer a voluntary withdrawal program that has had low adherence. Télam journalists are in complete limbo. According to the unions, it is not even a question of large salaries, since in the face of runaway inflation more than half of Télam’s journalists have a second job because their salary is not enough. These days they have received important support from a compatriot, Pope Francis, who has said he prays for his workers in a “nebulous situation.” The streets of Buenos Aires are full of stickers to defend that no one is superfluous in the agency.

“There are many people who were used to not working at all and now everything is being cut off from them. It’s unfortunate, but it is what it is. “Everything is very bad,” comments a waiter from a nearby bar, probably a Milei voter, upon seeing the protests.