In Argentina there are no military uprisings, but of football fans. At least that is convinced of Javier Milei’s government, which one day after a violent march of retirees held in front of Congress on Wednesday denounced “a kind of coup” perpetrated, he said, by “barrabravas” supported by the Kirchner peronisno. The thesis defended the head of ministers, Guillermo Francos. The Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich, was more accurate: she accused the communal leaders of La Matanza and Lomas de Zamora, two popular districts of the outskirts of the city of Buenos Aires, linked to the former president, Cristina Kirchner. In the Casa Rosada they do not believe that the dozen fans of football teams that joined the protest that retirees do each week has been innocent. The march ended in a war between protesters and police, with a hundred detainees and about twenty injured, including a “Kirchner” photographer, as Bullrich called him, who is on the edge of death due to the impact of a gas bomb on the head. The incidents, the most serious since Milei assumed in December 2023, have not produced anything similar to a coup d’etat, but they did show that the ultra government no longer has the total control of the street.
Milei does not go through his best moment. During the last weeks, a string of unfdied errors have put it, for the first time, defensive. The aura of the ultra -rightist began to lose strength at the end of January, when in a speech in Davos it linked homosexual couples with pedophilia. Days later, he had to face a manifestation of repudiation that brought together more than 80,000 people alone in Buenos Aires. A month ago, the $ Libra scandal arrived, a cryptocurrency that Milei promoted from its social networks. $ Libra was actually a monumental scam that activated judicial investigations in the United States and suspicions of corruption that affect Karina Milei, sister and emotional support of the president. Two weeks later, Milei opened another in front of appointing two judges for the Supreme Court, an attribution that the Constitution grants to the Senate. One of his candidates has not yet been able to assume because the supremes denied him the license he had asked as a federal judge. The other already swore, but the Senate has the votes to reject the specifications, a situation that would put it in the face of the decision to resist the year that lasts its internship or renounce.
The straight line of bad news is affecting the image of president. The polls agree that, for the first time, Milei’s negative image surpasses the positive. Those who make statistics on social networks also show an even more worrying scenario for the ultra -rightist: Trolls Payments that defend management cost them more and more impose themselves on the stage where they were always stronger. The survey made by the consultant ad hoc In February, he revealed that after the $ Libra scandal, and “despite the efforts to resume the agenda”, the messages that referred to Milei were more negative than positive. The stage was not the best when the incidents occurred in the march of Wednesday.
Retirees represent a specially respected sector in Argentina. They are since the 1990s in the first line of resistance to the adjustments that the different governments have tried on them. Today, an Argentine retiree charges the equivalent of just over $ 350, less than half of what the basic basket that marks the poverty line costs. They have been marching for five years every week in front of Congress, first dozens and now several hundred. The police got more and more hard with them, on the grounds that the “antipiquetes” protocol devised by Minister Bulrrich authorizes her to use the force when the traffic is cut. The image of an older man hit with the Chacarita shirt activated the fans of that club last week, the first of a list that quickly added to others, such as Boca, River, Independiente or Racing .. the government denounced then that they were not spontaneous supporters, but barrabravas supported by Peronist leaders willing to “turn” to the government.
It was not necessary for much more so that the last manifestation of retirees became a street battle. “The government will not leave the construction of this violent logic, because it is precisely what we have achieved that there is no longer in Argentina,” said Minister Bullrich, and showed, perhaps without knowing it, the magnitude of the challenge facing Milei.
Without a national party that supports it, Milei’s popularity is sustained over two pillars: his triumph over inflation and street control. The president usually remember with euphoria that Bullrich ended with hard hand to the piquetera protests that converted the city of Buenos Aires every day into chaos. Inflation remains under control, but now the street is not an insured territory. The Government’s strategy has been overlapping the danger, dusting the idea of an unlikely coup d’etat. Even the vice president, Victoria Villarruel, a denialist of the dictatorship, said that violence in the square seemed, rather than a failed coup, “part of the exercise of democracy.” Villaruel and Milei have not spoken for months and are not spoken, but the vice president is an example that more and more leaders are encouraged in public to contradict the president’s speech.
The crisis has given wings, of course, to the opposition. In Congress, a commission that investigates the President for the $ Libra scandal was one step away from his approval and spoke again about the possibility of a political trial. This Thursday, the Senate advanced towards the blockade of Milei’s candidates for the Court. Peronism abuses it in the face of adversity, and smells blood. With a Milei that seems weaker, to the CGT, the largest central in the country, decided to break the non -aggression pact with the Casa Rosada. Fearful that the pressure of his guilds became uncontrollable, the union dome announced on Thursday a 24 -hour national strike “before April 10”.
Next Wednesday there will be another fire test for Milei: retirees will go again, the football fans will now join the CTA unions, a more combative working central than the CGT that groups, above all, the state employees who are now victims of the presidential chainsaw.
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