By Tony Phillips
More than one million people protested and marched against President Javier Milei’s racist, anti-feminist and particularly anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric on Feb. 1. Argentines and supporters gathered in the streets of Argentina and outside embassies and consuls in London, Madrid, Granada and New York in what they called the “March for LGBTQ+, Antiracist and Antifascist Pride. Demonstrations also took place in cities in Germany, The Netherlands, Portugal, Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay.
Since becoming president, Milei’s hate-speech has been commonplace, but what sparked the mass demonstrations was an especially virulent rant at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos Switzerland on Jan. 23. Milei shocked the powerful gathering and outraged rights organizations by equating homosexuality with pedophilia and child abuse: “The ‘ideology of gender’ is plain and simple child abuse. They are pedophiles,” he proclaimed to the leaders of the world. He also vowed to rescind the penal code against femicide, decrying it as a special privilege for women.
Global Demonstrations
The Argentine LGBTIQ+ communities, feminist and human rights organisations had had enough. A group of more than a thousand met informally in Lezama park, in San Telmo, Buenos Aires and after listening to angry speeches they decided to call for a massive mobilisation on Feb. 1.
Manuela Castañeira of the new New Movement to Socialism (Nuevo MAS) party called for getting “into the streets, but organized, against the hate-ridden, dark and fascist discourse of the government.”
“We can’t let hate speech win, because we can’t go back to the closet.” she said to cheers from the crowd.
Even the centrist Radical Civic Union (UCR) party, which often votes with Milei’s government, described the President’s remarks as “a new aberration”, stating “we end a fraternal embrace to immigrants, women, members of the LGBT community and political activists”–al groups vilified in Milei’s discourse. In a particularly defiant speech, a student representative introducing herself as Naty, sent a message to Milei that he will “be relegated to the dustbin of history.”
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women now in their 80’s whose sons and daughters were disappeared by paramilitaries, police and the military in the 1976-1983 dictatorship, joined the demonstrations. The Mothers issued a call “to bring people to the streets to repudiate this government of hunger, repression, offence, job losses, debt and the handover of national sovereignty. For the defence of employment, salaries, liberty and the right to food, healthcare and open sexual orientations.”
The press estimated 200,000+ in the march in Buenos Aires alone, beginning at the corner of the Senate and Congress buildings in Plaza Congreso then moving down Avenida de Mayo and across 9 de Julio to arrive in Plaza de Mayo in front of the Pink House, Argentina’s presidential palace. At least half the marchers were from a rich variety of LGBTQI+ groups, but other institutions marched including the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and women’s groups–indeed women made up the clear majority in the demonstrations, incensed, along with other human rights associations, at Javier Milei’s attempt to remove the laws designed to penalise femicide, which were successful in Argentina to reduce gender-targeted hate killings.
University groups, transport groups, and public scientists from CONICET marched defiantly. Even toddlers attended, held in the arms of mothers who sheltered them from the heat to demonstrate their opposition to Milei’s sexist and racist remarks.
The largest trade union, the CGT, sent its youth groups to the march after remaining relatively silent on the economic damage wreaked by Milei on the nation. Many of its members have been treated badly by state and private employers, but their leaders have reached quiet agreements to remain unpolitical after a couple of general strikes earlier in Milei’s presidency.
Organizers held more than forty marches across Argentina, some small and local, and others reaching tens of thousands in major cities like Mendoza, Córdoba and Rosario. Milei in an interview on LN+ (La Nación Plus) television channel after the march insisted that he did not watch the march (even on television). He went on to say he was taken out of context, that the march was all based on lies and ignorance. As to the accusation of fascism, he actually stated that Italian Fascism and German Nazi were both anti-liberal and socialist, which was later roundly criticised for its historical revisionism.
Hatred as Political Economics
The World Economic Forum brings together heads of state and business to discuss the global economy, but President Milei chose instead to use his hour-long slot to transmit some of his more vile and extreme ideas. His attacks on gay people, the state, the left (or “wokism”), women and migrants sent a direct message to the fascist elements among Milei’s supporters and the far-right around the world. He also seemed to be specifically aiming to ingratiate himself with the new US president Donald Trump and the American Conservative Union (CPAC.org) backers. Trump has been a strong backer of Milei, and even dubbed his government the new MAGA (Make Argentina Great Again).
Milei’s “culture wars”, as he likes to call his twisted conservative campaign for traditional morality, rings false from the mouth of the unmarried Argentine president who brags about his former employment as a sex coach. However Milei, like Donald Trump, uses the culture wars to gain power and votes. In the Davos speech, Milei focused his contempt on “woke-ism’, his own far-right construction of a word he uses frequently but clearly finds very difficult to pronounce. For Milei, ‘woke’ is the enemy of some fabled white man’s Judaeo-Christian Western civilisation.
Woke became commonly used in the Black Lives Matter movement. Its literal meaning of awakened, with eyes wide open, gained a meaning of awareness of social and political issues, especially referring to racism. To Milei and others in the far right, ‘woke’ is a culture war codeword used disparagingly to argue for the repeal of specific rights held by anyone not white, binary, conservative, or wealthy. Black or brown people, women, and LGBTIQ+ people are accused of holding special privileges in his narrative.
This discourse includes a whiny claim to victimhood while ignoring all evidence of structural oppression in modern society:
“…wokeism’s first strategy is to discredit those of us who challenge these things first by labelling us and then by silencing us. If you’re white, you must be racist. If you’re a man, you must be a misogynist or part of the patriarchy. If you’re rich, you must be a cruel capitalist. If you’re heterosexual, you must be heteronormative, homophobic or transphobic.”
Mile also repeated ugly accusations against immigrants that are common among the extreme right in Europe and the United States and entirely irrelevant in Argentina, citing non-existent “hordes of immigrants who abuse, assault, or even kill European citizens whose only sin was not adhering to a particular religion. But when someone questions these situations, they are immediately labelled racists, xenophobic or even Nazis”.
Aside from the fact that the far right is, quite openly, most of these things in any given place or moment, the ploy of playing victim seeks to preemptively discredit the discrediting of their extreme views. Milei concluded by calling for a cure to the “mental virus of woke ideology”, dogwhistling to his friends in Vox and Fratelli d’Italia. The Davos crowd clapped politely at the demonization of the majority of the world’s population.
Damage Control
Milei’s supporters and his public relations groups tried to roll back the PR disaster of the speech and the massive show of public repudiation, even attempting to deny his hate speech by suggesting that videos had been edited by the political opposition. This strategy immediately failed since the complete video coverage of the speech filmed by the World Economic Forum at Davos and an official transcript were widely available and more than incriminating.
Key members of Milei’s shadow government also sprang into action, sharing darker messages online, including a veiled threat from ‘X’ accounts managed by Santiago Caputo, a neofascist aide who wrote, “The Alfonsin consensus is dead”. Caputo, who writes under the pen-name “MileiEmperor” recently posted a poll asking whether people would accept a non-democratic government with zero inflation.
The reference is to president Raul Alfonsin who managed the transition to peace (1983-1989) when Argentina restarted its democracy following the military dictatorships. The bloody military junta reached a pact with Alfonsin to resolve their differences without further state terror. Caputo seemed to indicate that state terror may soon be back.
Legal Action from Podemos
Podemos, the Spanish political party, which has some of its largest groups in Argentina, decided to bring a legal case against Javier Milei in Buenos Aires province Argentina’s richest state which is governed by Milei’s arch-enemy, the centre-left economist and a probable presidential candidate in the next election: Axel Kicilloff.
The legal action is based on the wording in Milei’s Davos speech and public statements he also made that week in Washington D.C.. Specifically they charge that this violates Criminal Codes relating to threats (article 149), public intimidation (Art. 211), justification of crimes (Art. 213) and discrimination citing the following:
“We will hunt you down to the last corner of the planet, lefty sons of bitches, tremble“, “We will exterminate the woke trash with all mechanisms at hand“, and “Woke ideology is the cancer that must be extirpated“.
The Podemos legal action also cited Milei linking gender ideology to child abuse in the Davos quote cited above.
