Over a million Argentines took to the streets in every major city of the country yesterday to march in defense of tuition-free public education and against President Javier Milei’s plan to veto the recently passed university financing bill. That bill provides funding for public universities whose budgets Milei has already savagely slashed. Although the march was multi-generational, with university professors, students, trade unionists, non-teaching staff, members of social organizations, etc., young people predominated. They were undeterred by barricades that police had erected to prevent them from reaching the National Congress in Buenos Aires or other provincial locations.
Photos of the mobilization showed huge colorful banners and flags, representing many different organizations. One sign, addressing Milei, read “My future doesn’t belong to you.” Other signs referenced the figures just released by the national statistical agency INDEC, reporting that poverty among students had jumped from 33.8% during the last quarter of 2023, before Milei took office, to 48.5% during the first quarter of 2024. “If you’re hungry, you can’t think,” read another. The national poverty rate now stands at 52.9% up from 41% last Dec. 10 when Milei took office.
In the hours leading up to the march, the always scowling Security Minister Patricia Bullrich issued shrill warnings that the strike was really a coup plot and that “extremist” forces were planning to unleash violence with Molotov cocktails, etc. None of that happened. There is panic, however, that Milei doesn’t have the 87 votes he needs to veto the university financing bill, which passed with a sizable majority. The size of the march may give many lawmakers pause when they’re asked to destroy students’ futures.
Milei reportedly spent the day holed up in the presidential palace, issuing insulting posts on X against opposition figures and complaining that universities had falsified the number of their students to get more government money.
