March 2, 2024 (EIRNS)—In his first state of the union address before the national Congress last night, Argentina’s deranged President Javier Milei laid out his roadmap for killing as many of his citizens as possible. Declaring the policies of the last 100 years to have been “a failure,” and blaming all the country’s present ills on the previous government, he told Argentines who are already suffering the effects of the savage austerity imposed since Dec. 10, which caused the poverty rate to jump by 10%, that they must suffer more. This is the price to be paid for “freedom,” he said, and warned that he has only just begun his series of vicious reforms. Nothing will stop him, he vowed, even if society ostracizes him.
The entire event was a show. He changed the time of his speech to 9:00 pm, rather than the normal time of 12 noon. He also changed the physical platform from which the President normally speaks and had a special podium built for himself with the presidential seal to imitate the U.S. President’s protocol during the State of the Union. The upper balconies were filled with supporters who applauded wildly, yelled and chanted at several points during the speech. Outside, an unprecedented 5,000-person police deployment surrounded the Congress and extended for several blocks, shutting down streets in anticipation of protests. Tear gas was used liberally on protesters who showed up with large anti-Milei signs, banged on pots and pans and chanted.
Milei asserted that the previous government of Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had left “the worst legacy in all Argentine history,” blaming it for poverty, illiteracy, homelessness, “an orgy of public spending,” waste, inflation, huge deficits, etc. etc. He had the nerve to accuse his predecaessors of contracting “an enormous debt with multilateral credit organizations that left us on the verge of default”—forgetting the unpayable $44 billion IMF loan that his ally, former neocon President Mauricio Macri, had contracted in 2018.
