Argentina According to Milei

To his detractors, Javier Milei is rude, ignorant and a danger to democracy. He’s also undoubtedly one of the world’s most infamous politicians, and the new face of populism. We profile Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding president and meet his closest supporters.

After his first year in power, inflation is down from 25.5% to 2.4%. A tax amnesty, allowing the wealthy to repatriate money hidden abroad, has brought €30 billion back into the country’s banking system. Like most of the elite, Argentinian business man – Mariano La Torre – is delighted by Milei’s economic policy: “For economic policy, I’d give him 10 out of 10 even 11 out of 10 if I could. It’s perfect. I take my hat off to him. This is the most important change in a century.” After years living in Oslo, he’s preparing to return to Buenos Aires.   

For others, however, the effects have been brutal. “I don’t have a job, my mother is disabled and I have to pay the rent. What am I going to do?” laments Turky, one of the 50,000 civil servants who have lost their jobs. Despite the inflation, pensions have been frozen and now even those on the lowest incomes have to pay for their own medicines. 77-year-old Ruben has had to return to work.

Juan Luis González is a journalist who has been investigating the president’s messianic style for several years. “Milei sees himself as a prophet. For him, religion is the ultimate goal,” he explains. When his beloved dog, Conan, died, he had five clones created. In private messages obtained by González, the president explains how these clones inspire his policies. “One of them is Conan’s reincarnation … the clones are also his connection to God.”

The Gran Chaco forest is the second largest forest in South America after the Amazon. But it is being destroyed by bulldozers. This massive deforestation is clearing the ground for soya cultivation and cattle farming. Under Javier Milei, who denies climate change and has lifted forest protections, it is accelerating. Indigenous communities have been particularly affected. “We are losing all our resources, the things that keep us peasant families alive,” despairs Daniel. “Our culture is disappearing.”

From the vast wilderness of the north of the country, threatened by the acceleration of lithium mining, to the bourgeois neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires, this is an immersion in Javier Milei’s ultra-liberal Argentina.