LIKE many of Buenos Aires’s inhabitants, Fabian, the concierge in my apartment block, is of Paraguayan descent.

On the morning of November 20 last year, I asked him what he thought of Javier Milei’s landslide victory that had seen him elected president the night before. “Argentinians,” he said, “Simply never learn.”

A year on, the most right-wing president in modern Argentine history has lived up to his promise to transform the country by effectively dismantling the state and replacing it with private enterprise.

His avowed intention is to reduce Argentina’s financial deficit to zero, defeat inflation and prioritise repayments to the International Monetary Fund, to which they owe $31 billion, a debt equivalent to 5 per cent of the country’s GDP.
 
In order to achieve his aims, Milei has closed several government departments and ministries, laying off thousands of civil servants in the process. Unsurprisingly, given Milei’s antipathy towards feminism and LGBT rights and his dismissal of climate change as a “socialist lie,” they include the ministries for women and the environment.

In addition to removing subsidies for transport, health, education and energy, government assistance programmes for those most in need have been removed.

The net result of these draconian measures has left 52.9 per cent of the population below official poverty levels in the first six months of 2024, an increase of 12.8 per cent over the corresponding period last year.

The number of those suffering from chronic indigence or destitution has practically doubled over the same period, from 9.3 per cent of the population to 18.1 per cent. In other words, nearly 25 million Argentinians are poor, an increase of 16 million from the second half of 2023, of which 8.5 million are destitute.

And if this were not bad enough, the national averages tend to understate the problems in the most deprived areas of Argentina, such as the northern province of Chaco, where a staggering 76 per cent of the population in the capital Resistencia live below the poverty line.
 
Milei has been able to push much of his legislative programme through congress despite his La Libertad Avanza party only having 38 deputies in the lower house (out of 257) and seven senators in the upper chamber (out of 72) by promulgating a series of decrees that can, generally, only be overturned if two-thirds of the congress oppose them.

A combination of support from right-wing blocs of legislators and threats to withdraw funding from provincial Budgets have enabled him to veto an increase for pensioners in line with inflation and withdraw funding from Argentina’s public universities. The president has publicly claimed that the right to an education does not exist, even though it is guaranteed by the constitution.
 
Milei’s foreign policy can be summed up as being in line with the most reactionary elements of Western imperialism, including unconditional support for the Israeli genocide in Palestine.

He has abandoned Argentina’s decades-long stance of neutrality in international affairs, preferring instead to slavishly follow the dictates of the US.

The US’s Southern Command General Laura Richardson has been treated as if she were a head of state. In April of this year, Milei travelled nearly 2,000 miles to meet her during her visit to Ushuaia at the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego in an embarrassing display of obsequiousness.

More recently, he was desperate to get an invitation to Donald Trump’s celebration party at the latter’s Mar-a-Lago Florida residence and was subsequently photographed there, grinning like a little schoolboy under the gaze of the president-elect who probably cannot believe his luck in having such an obedient patsy in charge of South America’s second-largest economy.
 
Milei’s big idea is the formation of an intergovernmental organisation of “conservative” nations that would seek to align efforts to combat the left and preach the virtues of liberty, ie neoliberal capitalism.

In these endeavours, he has received the support of British extremists, notably Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, who visited him in Buenos Aires.

His stated aim is to sign a free-trade agreement with the US, an initiative that, if concluded, would be disastrous for Argentina’s domestic production, already reeling from the removal of import restrictions and the introduction of measures to facilitate foreign investment at their expense.

It would also signal the end of the South American Common Market, Mercosur, that forbids its members (Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil) from entering into individual trade agreements with third parties.

Clearly, Milei has no interest in furthering the cause of greater Latin America and believes that the way forward is complete subservience to and dependence on Washington’s dictates.

At the annual debate in the UN on the illegal blockade of Cuba, Argentina’s representative Diana Mondino voted for it to be lifted and was promptly sacked by an irate Milei.
 
Resistance to the Milei regime has come from the streets and has on occasions been brutally repressed under the orders of the Security Minister Patricia Bullrich, who appears to take a perverse delight in authorising the police to violently disperse demonstrations.

In August, thousands of pensioners demonstrating outside the congress were beaten and gassed by heavily armed paramilitary police.

Argentina’s largest trade union federation, the CGT, has mounted nationwide day-long general strikes, but although they are impressively well observed, they do little to shake government confidence.

There has been no concerted and co-ordinated action with the organisations representing the urban poor or with the student bodies who have shown themselves capable of building massive resistance to proposals that would effectively close their universities.
 
Despite the hardship being endured by many Argentinians, Milei still enjoys a degree of popular support, though polls show that it is waning.

Like so many right-wing demagogues in other parts of the world, he was elected because people had lost faith in the ability of the traditional parties to improve their living standards under their brand of capitalism.

During the restrictions imposed upon them during the Covid epidemic, resentment was directed against those who enjoyed a degree of protection by being employed by the state or being in receipt of some form of government support.

The anger manifested itself in aggressive social media sites, particularly among young people and accentuated a divide in Argentine society that has been present since the 1950s, a divide that Milei cleverly exploited to win an election despite having no previous ministerial experience.

His rants and diatribes directed against the “caste” of Establishment politicians, trade unionists and journalists who, in his opinion, only worked to defend their own interests struck a chord in an increasingly intolerant society and led to his unexpected victory.
 
With inflation higher than it was in 2014, unemployment at record levels and public services on the point of collapse, the next three years of Milei’s mandate will be difficult to endure for the majority of Argentina’s population.

Poverty breeds crime, and drug-related violence is on the increase among the urban poor who see little hope of advancement in a fractured society.

It will take radical and revolutionary change to improve matters, and we can only hope that Fabian is wrong and that Argentinians will finally learn that reactionary, authoritarian politicians will never be their saviour.