On Wednesday, Mar. 12 a police car was burning in Avenida de Mayo next to an Art Deco building of the former newspaper “Critica” on Avenida de Mayo in central Buenos Aires. An unusual occurrence since the building is now the office of the Superintendent of the Argentine Federal Police force. Someone left the vehicle parked and empty, door open, lights on. With thousands of police in the streets, there were none around when a small crowd turned the car over and set it on fire in broad daylight.
Javier Milei’s Minister for National Security, Patricia Bullrich is responsible for police and armed forces. Bullrich immediately called setting fire to the patrol car tantamount to a coup d’État,
“There was an attempted coup d’état, inside and outside Congress [today.] What is certain is that yesterday there was utterly premeditated organisation on the part of violent groups that came from all over to Congress to attack, to disrupt and to burn public property”, Bullrich said.
Given the events of the day, it was not clear whether the “violent groups” to which she refers were the football fans, the elderly pensioners, elements of the president’s own government or her own police forces.
Pensioners and Football fans
Every Wednesday for months, a small but politically active group of pensioners get together for a march. They demonstrate in an attempt to highlight the reductions in purchasing power of their state pensions which have lost between a third and a quarter of their value. Prices have tripled in Argentina, especially in expenses essential for the older population, like medicines, rent and food. Just in 2024 with the market deregulation of Milei’s far-right liberalism, inflation in pharmaceuticals was 230%, and they continue to rise in 2025.
The pensioners gather to march around the Congress building. Many are well into their eighties, and walk with canes. Toward the end of February Minister Bullrich ordered harsher repression of the aging activists. Images of the beatings and the young football fans rushing in to protect the elderly pensioners from brutal police repression went viral. As the beatings increased, a group of football fans self organised to protect “the grandparents”. The pensioners had unified Argentine football fans that hate each other’s teams.
Facing young and old together, Bullrich doubled down, deploying a massive police presence which included police forces never used in the city, such as port and airport police.
The police went in heavily armed with new weapons, a scene set for a massive
confrontation. They confronted demonstrators in the streets for hours. Hundreds were arrested and several hundred injured. The photographer Pablo Grillo remains in a coma after police fired a 38mm CS gas canister that broke his skull. These gas projectiles are supposed to be fired into the air, they were banned in Argentina until 2023. Bullrich immediately legalised them when she took power.
What will the IMF Think?
The violent chaos that ensued on the streets of Buenos Aires on Mar. 12 with hundreds arrested has tarnished Milei’s image at a critical moment. The president recently announced a new debt deal with the International Monetary Fund and although he did not reveal the amount, analysts say it would represent an additional 10-20 billion in debt for a nation that has experienced a series of political and economic crisis due to unpayable debts.
International coverage of police truncheoning the elderly as they protested the cost of living poses problems for the IMF negotiating a “consensual agreement” between a democratic nation while trying to show it’s a responsible multilateral financial organization.
IMF Director Kristalina Georgieva has asked that the IMF new loan agreement be approved by the Argentine Congress as required by Argentine law. On Mar. 13 Congress deputies were trying to legislate the illegality of Milei’s autocratic misuse of presidential decrees
(DNUs by the Spanish initials) to bypass the constitutional separations of powers. Milei, that very week, had bypassed congressional consent requirements for approval of the new IMF debt agreement with yet another DNU.
No president of Argentina (even de facto presidential dictators) has ever used as many DNU’s as Milei. Milei had even tried to use a DNU to pack the Supreme Court with his own judges, but the court itself refused to accept them. When DNU’s were not enough Milei has used his presidential veto to block legislation (even vetoing legislation voted in by his own allies in Congress). This happened in September 2024, when Congress approved a small increase in pensions. If Milei had not vetoed that increase, maybe Bullrich’s police force would not be sending pensioners to hospital every Wednesday.
Milei’s government has also been accused of bribery buying votes in the Senate, further reducing the number of Argentines who believe in Milei’s democratic intentions.
Can the IMF board really give Argentina a vote of confidence (and billions of dollars in a new loan) under such circumstances? Argentina is already the largest IMF debtor on the planet. The IMF is controlled by its largest contributors, the US is the largest of them with veto voting rights, where president Donald Trump backs Milei, but other large contributors on the IMF board will not be so easy to convince.
Fragile monetarism and mid-term elections
Milei’s economic ultra-orthodoxy is working well for international financial investors, but it continues to punish the local economy. The first 13 months of Milei’s government showed contraction of national economic activity combined with real price increases month on month without pause. Milei’s stagflation has caused a deep recession just as he approaches his first mid-term election in October 2025.
The October election is pegged to fill half of the seats in Congress and a third in the Senate. The economy will be a core issue. Milei’s government has spent most of the country’s (now negative) international foreign currency reserves selling dollars to support the bloated peso. This has resulted in foreign short-term investor speculation in Argentine pesos (known as carry trade speculation on peso bonds).
Milei is now very short on dollars. He believes his last chance to do well in the October elections, depends on a generously flexible IMF loan with fresh dollars upfront and little or no conditionalities.
The IMF, however, has never been happy with governments using their loans in unproductive ways to win elections. The IMF board still has to ratify the agreement. Milei hopes rapid ratification will allow him to hobble through till October despite his propped-up peso policy, “free” markets, zero price controls even on monopoly pricing, privatisation of state assets, further reduction in the public sector and, what are now the highest prices in South America for many goods. He faces continued demonstrations by pensioners and a new plan for a general strike.
The problem is who pays for Finance Minister Caputo’s financial largesse and peso policies? The government has vowed not to increase taxes, indeed Milei’s government has been reducing export taxes on the rich, so this will likely be paid out of the new IMF debt.
Meanwhile, the local economy and wages continue to languish and the public sector (education, road building etc…) is frozen and increasingly broken. Milei plans to deepen his finance-friendly social adjustment programme through to the October elections. He may plan to float the peso on international markets removing currency controls after the elections if he manages to consolidate power. The way things are going, that prospect looks extremely risky.
Smokescreens covering a deepening Crypto crisis
In 1933 Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros visited Buenos Aires. He stayed on the luxurious Estancia of Natalio Botana, the flamboyant editor of “La Crítica” then Argentina’s most influential newspaper. It was there Siqueiros, Spilimbergo and Berni painted the now famous mural “Ejercicio Plástico”.
Hector Oliviera’s Film “El Mural” (2010) tells the story of how this great work was created. In Oliviera’s film General Agustín P. Justo visits Botana with a problem. Justo had been part of a rightwing coup d’État that began an “infamous” decade of coups and rigged elections helping put the fascist Uriburu in power. Uriburu later called “elections” and Justo became president.
Justo confides to Botana that he’s very concerned about what “the Europeans” might think as an assassin had shot the wrong senator on the Senate floor that week. Botana tells him not to worry, nobody will remember this next week, he assured Justo.
Botana then invents the discovery of the body of the world-famous tango artist Gardel, and pays to repatriate the “body”. The ploy works, people forgot all about the shooting and Botana filled the front pages of his newspaper with an empty casket and a staged burial ceremonies.
Like Justo one hundred years before, Milei and his finance minister Luis Caputo, have a quiet agenda they’d rather keep under wraps. They are using DNUs to push through more international debt to keep peso bond speculators happy, while at the same time trying to divert attention from the growing scandal around Javier Milei’s direct involvement in promoting the $Libra in his twitter account, which was essential to what is now seen as a $100 million-dollar bitcoin heist.
Right now, Milei’s first priority is to put a cap on the Cryptogate scandal. While paramilitary vehicles were shooting at Argentine citizens outside, a group of deputies from Javier Milei’s own party, La libertad Avanza, were having fist fights inside congress on that same day.
Analyst Laura Serra explained that the Peronist opposition to Milei’s government had tried to take the Cryptogate scandal to the impeachment commission. The pump-and-dump scheme (in meme-coin parlance, a “rug pull”) was illegal under US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules until January 23rd when Trump intervened in SEC regulation of bitcoin exchanges. Regardless of US SEC rules, an extended debate over impeachment could seriously damage Milei in Argentina and abroad.
As Milei’s political opponents tried to take the cryptogate scandal to the commission, the first problem they encountered was “What commission?” As Laura Serra, specialist in politics explained in an interview on Radio Con Vos, the authorities in this new Impeachment Commission had yet to be ratified.
As police vehicles were burning outside, Peronist deputies were pushing for a vote to ratify the commission’s authorities so that it could become active even though Marcela Pagano, (a member of Milei’s own La libertad Avanza (LLA) party) was set to become president of the commission. Pagano’s own party walked out of the congressional debate to drop the quorum and block the vote. When this didn’t work, because Pagano herself refused to leave, the speaker of the house Martin Menem (also LLA) went against procedure and stopped the ratification vote anyway. LLA deputies broke into a furious fist fight.
After the Repression
On the night of Mar. 12, Argentine called for, and participated in caserolazos with their neighbours in barrios and towns across Argentina. Caserolazos are when ordinary citizens take kitchen utensils and bang pots from balconies. Other opponents of the violence (some still sporting injuries from rubber bullets that day) took to the streets, some collecting in large groups blocking intersections and diverting traffic. Caserolazos on the 12th were large, even in middle and some upper class neighbourhoods. The people expressed their disgust at the incidents of the day and their support for the pensioners who walked among their neighbours, visibly moved.
Some citizens took their raucous protest to the Casa Rosada, just metres from Siqueiros’ Ejercicio Plástico. Milei had gone home by then, but the noisy pots and pans banging on the railings in front of the Casa Rosada called into question his government’s future.
Photographer: Hernán Reig. Instagram: @reighernan
Tony Phillips, Argentina, is an Irish ecological economist living in Buenos Aires. He writes about debt, development and the power of finance. He specializes in Ecological concerns for international finance and in Latin American regional integration (MERCOSUR/UNASUR). He is an analyst and translator with the Americas Program. Much of Tony’s work is published at ProjectAllende.org Tony’s most recent book Europe on the Brink can be found here: EuropeOnTheBrink.com .
