The far-right Javier Milei turned on the chainsaw as soon as he arrived at the Casa Rosada on December 10. The new Argentine president did not want to waste time to carry out his promise to dismantle the welfare state and reduce everything public to what is essential. In the country where tourists take photos of pickets and protests as if they were something typical, the expected social conflict seemed to be anticipated. However, Milei’s opponents, mainly Peronism and left-wing social movements, are acting with unexpected caution.
The main labor union in Argentina, the Peronist General Confederation of Labor (CGT), called its first protest against the Government this Wednesday in Buenos Aires. But strikingly he did it in almost Scandinavian ways: he asked for permission to demonstrate, he did not block streets and he deconcentrated quickly and with hardly any incidents.
The union call had a very specific objective. Instead of taking Avenida 9 de Julio or Plaza de Mayo, the CGT organized a rally in Plaza Lavalle, in front of the Palace of Justice, to present a petition in court to suspend Milei’s December 20 megadecree as unconstitutional. aims to extreme liberalize the Argentine economy. However, a labor court rejected this Wednesday, in record time, the request of the labor union, arguing that the decree has not yet come into force.
Despite having been signed by the president, Milei’s package of 300 measures must be ratified by Congress, where the Government and its Macrista allies do not have a majority and need to reach pacts with other parties to make it effective. The megadecree aims to rapidly deregulate the economy, privatize all public companies, promote private medicine, liberalize sectors such as wine or airlines, modify the Civil and Commercial Code, open up the use of the dollar or repeal laws such as Rentals, which protects to the tenants.
The CGT protest occurred a day after the Casa Rosada announced on Tuesday that it will not renew 5,000 public employee contracts that end on December 31 and who entered the administration in 2023, coinciding with the last year of the CGT’s mandate. Peronist Alberto Fernández. The Association of State Workers (ATE) denounces that the figure is 7,000 layoffs. Likewise, the Government will review the contracts signed prior to January 1, 2023. The Executive also announced that it will analyze the social plans for the poorest, aid that more than one million Argentines receive, arguing that some 160,000 beneficiaries would be receiving them irregularly.
This Wednesday’s rally, which brought together about 8,000 people, was also joined by the ATE, the main union of public employees, and different left-wing social movements that already took to the streets last week, barely gathering 3,000 people and did not cut off the July 9th.
Street closures and pickets, with the consequent collapse of traffic in Buenos Aires, have been normalized in the last two decades. However, the arrival of Milei led to the appointment as Minister of Security of the right-wing Patricia Bullrich, Macrista’s presidential candidate in the first round and now an ally of the president. Bullrich, who held the same position in the government of Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), more strongly reactivated his so-called “anti-picketing protocol”, exerting unprecedented strict police pressure on the picketers to avoid street closures.
The minister has warned beneficiaries of social plans that if they participate in any protest they will lose the subsidies they receive; In this sense, the police have begun to record protesters and use facial recognition programs to identify them.
“The labor rights that they violate are enormous, but they also violate a lot of rights,” Héctor Daer, one of the three general secretaries of the CGT, said this Wednesday about the decrees, which is already threatening a general strike. Daer added that there are “a lot of sectors of citizens that are affected” by a megadecree that “only pleases the interests of a small group of economic power in Argentina that is the one that will benefit from these measures.”
