There’s an old joke in Argentina: Argentines are Italians who speak Spanish, think they’re British, and live in Paris. Sixty-two percent of Argentines have some Italian ancestry. Argentina’s 1853 constitution was influenced by Anglophiles who used British self-government as a model and encouraged British immigration, which later brought soccer. Buenos Aires is nicknamed “the Paris of the Southern Hemisphere,” since many buildings there were designed by French and Belgian architects in the Parisian art nouveau style around the turn of the 20th century. At that time, European immigrants were flooding in, and Argentine beef, wool, grain, and tango dancing were popular in Europe and North America. By 1913, Argentina was one of the 10 wealthiest countries per capita in the world.
Times changed. Today, many of Argentina’s historic buildings are decaying due to neglect. Many others have been demolished. In 2023, Argentina ranked 72nd in the world in GDP per capita, just behind China and ahead of Montenegro. Nearly a century of economic mismanagement, excessive government spending, deindustrialization, and experiments with “Christian socialism” sank Argentina into numerous financial crises. In 2001, the International Monetary Fund cut off loans to Argentina after its economy collapsed and it defaulted on its national debt (it has defaulted three more times since). During the past two decades, business taxes and extremely low public trust in governance have led to a lack of domestic investment. Annual inflation has spiraled out of control, peaking at 289 percent in April 2024.
Enter Javier Milei, Argentina’s fiery current president. He ran in 2023 on a platform of “radical change” that centered on the principles of classical liberalism. He promised to take a “chainsaw” to the bloated, corrupt bureaucracy and give the economy “shock therapy.” Thus far, he has delivered. On April 11, international financial institutions had seen so much progress over the first 1.5 years of Milei’s term that they agreed to $42 billion in bailout financing: $20 billion from the IMF, $12 billion from the World Bank, and $10 billion from the Inter-American Development Bank. The same day, Milei announced the end of Argentina’s “cepo cambiario” or “exchange clamp,” capital controls put in place in 2019 which heavily restricted Argentines’ ability to buy U.S. dollars. These restrictions led to a widespread black market for U.S. dollars and discouraged foreign investment. “Today we are breaking the cycle of disillusionment and disenchantment and are beginning to move forward for the first time,” said Milei on national television.
Under Milei, monthly inflation fell from 25.5 percent last December to just 2.4 percent in February, according to Argentina’s National Institute of Statistics and Census (INDEC). The poverty rate dropped nearly 15 percent in the second half of 2024 to 38.1 percent last December. Milei has already slashed some 30,000 government jobs and plans to cut 70,000 in total. He shrank the number of government ministries from 18 to nine, consolidating some and eliminating others altogether. The Cato Institute found that he made some 672 regulatory reforms over his first year in office, eliminating 331 regulations and modifying 341 others. (In this, he set a precedent for Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk. Milei visited with Musk at a Tesla factory in Texas last April, and Musk said in November that Milei had made “impressive progress.”) A year after taking office, Milei announced in December 2024 that the national budget deficit had been reduced to zero for the first time in more than 100 years. Annual inflation has dropped from 289 to 100 percent and is projected to drop to 26 percent by the end of the year. In 2024, Argentine stocks yielded yearly returns of 66 percent, by far the highest of any country in the world.
There have been steps backward. On April 10, thousands marched in the streets to support retirees in protest of Milei’s austerity measures, as transport workers held a 24-hour strike that shut down flights, buses, and trains. Laid-off government workers have staged protests in front of their former workplaces. And before dropping this year, Argentina’s poverty rate had initially risen from 45 percent at the end of 2023 to 53 percent in mid-2024. But Milei’s spokesman Manuel Adorni responded last September that the cause of that initial poverty increase was not the new government’s policies but “20 years of populism and destruction. … We took on the disaster, and we are correcting it.” Adorni added that “the chainsaw has no end,” and more cuts are to come. “Whatever we can cut, we will cut until the last day of our existence in our government.”
Besides trimming salaries and excessive spending, cutting bureaucracy makes it easier to monitor and control government corruption, a long-standing issue in Argentina. There are simply fewer officials who could potentially take bribes or embezzle funds.
Milei is part of a larger conservative ecosystem in Latin America that is leading a backlash against the failures of socialism in the region. One of the movement’s intellectual spearheads is a close ally of Milei, fellow Argentine Augustín Laje. At 36, Laje is a rock star of Latin American conservatism. He’s a prolific podcaster, writer, speaker, and debater, and his sharp insights, precise arguments, and ability to explain current events in a larger philosophical and historical context have earned him a TV, radio, and Internet following not only in Argentina but in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and other countries. Laje has written several bestselling books sold throughout Latin America: La Batalla Cultural: Reflexiones Críticas para una Nueva Derecha (The Culture War: Critical Reflections for a New Right), Generación Idiota (The Idiot Generation), and the latest, Globalismo: Ingeniería Social y Control Total en el Siglo XXI (Globalism: Social Engineering and Total Control in the 21st Century).
“New winds are blowing on our continent,” says Laje. He points to a surge of what he calls “outsider” presidents transforming the Americas: Trump, Milei, and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Laje says these leaders are “like lighthouses in our hemisphere.” Bukele is transforming law enforcement in El Salvador through mass incarceration of gang members, who have for decades terrorized citizens. Laje says that these three presidents all rose to power outside the traditional political classes, which he describes as dysfunctional.
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Besides shrinking budgets and bureaucracy, Milei has also gone on the offensive against wokeism. Last February, he banned the use of gender-neutral “inclusive language” by the national government. Spanish nouns generally end in o or a to denote whether they are masculine or feminine. But government gender-ideology advocates had implemented new endings, changing words such as todos (everyone) to todes, todxs, or tod@s. Milei’s administration announced last February that “the letter ‘e,’ the @, ‘x’ will not be used along with the unnecessary inclusion of the feminine variation of a word in all public administration documents.” Spokesman Adorni said, “The language that covers all sectors is the one we use. It’s the Castilian language. It’s Spanish.” The Royal Spanish Academy in Madrid said in 2021 that the use of masculine nouns “does not imply any sexist discrimination” and that so-called inclusive language is “unnecessary” and “disfigures the language in an unsustainable manner.”
From toppling statues in Colombia to non-binary gender identities on national IDs in Chile, wokeism has gained a foothold in Latin America. Woke ideology, however, seems all too familiar to many in the region, because it echoes the rhetoric of social division that fueled the Marxist uprisings they lived through in the 20th century and, more recently, the “pink tide” of socialist leaders in the 21st century who have engaged in election fraud, bribery, and other forms of corruption in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, among others. In Chile, Argentina’s neighbor across the Andes, President Gabriel Boric pushed what the Washington Post called a new “woke constitution,” but the country rejected it in a 2022 referendum. (It later rejected a new conservative constitution in 2023.) Meanwhile, Chile has seen a sharp rise in gang-related murders, violent crime, carjackings, and narco-trafficking. Boric’s approval rating has dropped from 56 percent to 28 percent since taking office in 2022.
Laje projects that socialism’s “days are numbered” virtually everywhere in Latin America except Mexico, which recently elected socialist president Claudia Sheinbaum. Besides Chile, Laje points to Peru, Brazil, and Colombia, where the approval ratings of socialist presidents are abysmal. And in Venezuela, where recent elections have been fraudulent, he projects that the socialist regime will fall not through foreign interventions but only through a popular uprising involving a military coup, which is likely to be bloody.
Laje grew up in Córdoba, Argentina, in a family of modest means. As he recounted on the Colombian podcast Revista Semana, he attended a “very leftist, very politicized” high school where teachers discouraged independent thought and were upset by counterarguments. Eventually, the school politely asked him to leave. This prompted him to dive into reading leftist materials to understand better how to refute radical arguments. Later, in college, Laje observed that the wealthy students were on the left while the poorer ones were on the right—even as leftist politicians claimed to represent the poor. “This caricature is absurd,” he says. “Who has more money, [Venezuela’s socialist president] Nicolás Maduro or Javier Milei?”
A student of history and politics, Laje is acutely aware of the pitfalls of past conservative movements in Latin America. He says that to win elections, what he calls the New Right must be libertarian, focused on “reducing the weight of the state on the lives of individuals, deregulating life, and not raising taxes.” He also says the New Right must be popular—of the people. “None of this oligarchy,” he told Revista Semana. “If the Right is not popular, it’s nothing.” He points to the fact that Milei won nearly 70 percent of the youth vote, and that Trump, Bukele, and Milei all won the support of the poorest voters.
The New Right is not afraid of political incorrectness, says Laje. It aims to expose how wokeism manufactures conflict and is driven by underlying agendas. “Wokeism is the permanent stimulation of political conflict taken into the realm of the personal,” he told deliberatio.eu in a 2023 interview. “Every personal, private, even intimate feature becomes a political matter for wokeism. Society will put up with this madness until it realizes that this is social engineering; that none of this is spontaneous; that there are big interests (economic, political, ideological) generating all these conflicts.”
Having spent over two decades as an economics professor, Milei gained popularity during the 2010s for his economics commentary on televised debates and talk shows, as well as on his own radio show, Demoliendo Mitos (Demolishing Myths). He describes himself as a libertarian and “anarcho-capitalist.” At a conference last September, he said he would not pursue the “controlling policies” that failed in the past. “I don’t believe that politicians are gods.”
On January 7, Milei published his vision for 2025 in La Nación. He said the fiscal improvements of the past year now provide “an enormous floor for growth.” Milei described 2024 as “the pivotal year in our history” and added that “simply by maintaining what has already been done, 2025 will be the beginning of the reconstruction of Argentina so that after 40 years we will once again be at the top of the world.” If he succeeds, Argentines will speak Spanish (not woke), know they’re Argentinian, and thrive in a Buenos Aries that Parisians may yet again flock to see.
Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
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