My Take | Argentina’s Milei wants China out, America in
- Chinese infrastructure builders are leaving and US spies, soldiers and corporate America are returning with the new government in Buenos Aires
In just 100 days, his government has banned most protests, cancelled a ministry for women and a national institute against discrimination, and shut down – by deploying heavily armed police – a state news agency, which it accused of “political bias”.
If all these things had happened in Hong Kong, you would have known all about it in 24/7 coverage from Washington and its faithful media servants in the Anglo-American press, just as you have been bombarded with heavily editorialised “news” about Hong Kong’s new security law. I really wonder how many of their readers or constituencies actually care about Article 23.
But all those not-very-nice things have been carried out by right-wing Argentine President Javier Milei, who is the new darling of Washington and the International Monetary Fund. So, nothing to see here, move on, please.
Of course, Milei really needs to ban protests. Poverty levels skyrocketed to 57.4 per cent of Argentina’s 46 million people in January, the highest in 20 years, according to a study by the Catholic University of Argentina. Child poverty could soon reach 70 per cent.
While his austerity programmes have won praise from the IMF, as they tend to do, they are making life worse for already hard-hit Argentines. No wonder the people are angry and want to hit the streets. Not by accident, rules on police deploying firearms have been relaxed.
But that’s all OK with Washington, and that’s why you don’t read or hear much about them in the mainstream news, not unless you really dig or know Spanish. Instead, the mainstream press seems mostly interested in Milei’s eccentricities such as his hairdo and his highly praised economic “reforms”.
