FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
With Trump's support, Argentine President Javier Miel can now lead the country to "greatness"...
On Sunday, Argentines voted in midterm elections, but they attracted an unusually high level of international attention.
This was partly due to a potential $40 billion bailout package promised by Washington for impoverished Buenos Aires. Before the vote, US President Donald Trump had made it clear that the injection of money depended on the election results.
And Trump's friend Javier Milley, the equally stylish president of Argentina, did not disappoint. Milley's party, La Libertad Avanza, achieved a surprising victory, taking more than 40 percent of the vote. Half of the seats in Argentina's Chamber of Deputies and a third of the seats in the Senate were up for grabs.
Of course, Trump wasted no time in appropriating the electoral success as a personal victory, claiming that Milley "had a lot of help from us. He had a lot of help."
Before the election, Trump explained that his generous gesture to Miley, made even as the US president was overseeing sweeping cuts to healthcare and other services in the country, was his way of "helping a great philosophy conquer a great country."
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent similarly claimed that the “bridge” the US was extending to Milei was in the hope “that Argentina can be great again”.
Call it MAGA – the South American version
But, as is the case with the US itself, it is not entirely clear when, exactly, in history Argentina was ever so “big.” Of course, there were also the good old days of the US-backed Dirty War, when a right-wing military dictatorship killed and disappeared tens of thousands of suspected leftists, many of whom were thrown from planes into the ocean or the Rio de la Plata.
As historian Greg Grandin documented in his biography of the lifelong American diplomat Henry Kissinger, the statesman advised the junta's Foreign Minister, Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti, in 1976: "If there are things that need to be done, you need to do them quickly."
Another great "philosopher"
Now, Trump is poised to preside over a renewed era of U.S. influence in the South American nation. And while the days of dropping troops from airplanes may be over, there's still plenty of room for right-wing brutality.
Milley, who defines himself as an "anarcho-capitalist" and who took the presidency in 2023, had a charming habit of using a chainsaw at political rallies to symbolize his approach to governance, which has been to slash spending on healthcare, education and other public services while overseeing massive job cuts and pension cuts.
In the first six months of Mr. Milley’s austerity program, poverty in Argentina rose to nearly 53 percent. Inflation has fallen, but so has purchasing power, and polls show that most Argentines do not earn enough to pay their monthly expenses. Sunday’s legislative victory—sorry, Trump’s victory—was essential to preserving the “chainsaw” strategy, which has worked well for some sectors of the Argentine elite anyway.
Until now, Milley's party held less than 15 percent of the seats in Congress. This meant that the president was forced to govern at the mercy of an opposition that insisted on overriding his vetoes.
Of course, Milley's sociopathic efforts are very dear to Trump's heart, and the US head of state has repeatedly come to his defense: " Everyone knows he's doing the right thing. But you have a sick culture of the radical left that is a very dangerous group of people, and they're trying to make him look bad ."
Of course, it takes a “sick culture of the radical left” to say that children should have healthcare or that people with disabilities should be given a helping hand.
Incidentally, Milley's government has effectively done its part to increase the number of disabled Argentines, by firing rubber bullets and tear gas at pensioners and other demonstrators protesting against violent austerity measures. In March, 33-year-old Jonathan Navarro was blinded in one eye by a rubber bullet while protesting on behalf of his father and other pensioners. /Adapted from "Pamphlet" by "Al Jazeera"
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