Sunday, Argentina Voted in mid-term elections which attracted an unusually high level of international attention. This is partly due to probability $40 billion bailout Promised to cash-strapped Buenos Aires by Washington. Before the vote, United States President Donald Trump had made it clear that the cash injection was dependent on the election results.
And Trump’s far-right friend Javier Mille, Argentina’s equally uniquely coiffed president, has not failed to deliver. Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, ran a rather closed clan Shocking winAccording to initial results, more than 40 percent of the votes were received. Half of the seats in Argentina’s lower Chamber of Deputies and one-third of the seats in the Senate were upheld.
Trump naturally wasted no time in seizing the election success as a personal victory, claiming Miley “got a lot of help from us. She got a lot of help.”
Trump before the election Explained The generous gesture he made to Miley was his own way of “helping a great philosophy take over a great country,” even as the US president deals with massive cuts to healthcare and other services at home.
So did US Treasury Secretary Scott Besant Argued The “bridge” that America had extended to Mile was the hope that “Argentina could be great again.”
Call it MAGA – the South American version.
But as for America itself, it’s not quite clear when Argentina was so “great” in history. Of course, there were the good old days of the US-backed Dirty War when right-wing military dictatorships murdered and disappeared thousands of suspected leftists, many of them Dropped from the plane into the sea Or the Rio de la Plata.
Historian Greg Grandin has documented in him Character As statesman Henry Kissinger, the perennial US diplomat, advised the junta’s foreign minister, Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti, in 1976: “If things have to be done, do them quickly.”
Another great “philosophy”.
Now, Trump is poised to preside over a new era of US influence in the South American nation. And while the days of dropping bodies from airplanes may be over, there’s still plenty of room for right-wing brutality.
Miei, who defines himself as an “anarcho-capitalist” and who takes over the presidency in 2023, has made a charming habit of wielding a chainsaw at political rallies as a symbol of his approach to governance – which is to reduce spending on healthcare, education and other public services while overseeing massive cuts.
In the first six months of Miei’s austerity program, poverty in Argentina rose to nearly 53 percent. Inflation is down, but so is purchasing power, and surveys show that most Argentines don’t earn enough to cover their monthly expenses. Sunday’s constructive victory – sorry, Trump’s victory – was crucial in maintaining the “chainsaw” policy, which has nevertheless worked well for some elite sectors of the Argentine population.
So far, Maile’s party had won less than 15 percent of the seats in Congress. That meant the president was forced to rule at the mercy of opponents who insisted on overriding his veto on things like expanding benefits for people with disabilities and restoring congressional funding for pediatric health care and universities.
Naturally, Miley’s philanthropic efforts are near and dear to Trump’s heart, and the US head of state has repeatedly come to her defense: “Everybody knows he’s doing the right thing. But you have a radical-left sick culture that’s a very dangerous group of people, and they’re trying to make him look bad.”
To be sure, it takes a “radical-leftist sick culture” to say that children should have access to healthcare or that people with disabilities should be helped.
Incidentally, Miei’s government has effectively played its part in increasing the number of disabled Argentines by firing rubber bullets and tear gas at pensioners and other protesters opposing violent austerity measures. In March, there was 33-year-old Jonathan Navarro blind in one eye with rubber bullets while protesting on behalf of his father and other retirees.
For his part, Trump, who undoubtedly sympathizes with the need A militarized response About the possibility of sending Tomahawk missiles to peaceful protesters, Argentina recently joked kindly to Miley: “You need them for your opposition, I guess.” Trump and Miley also see eye-to-eye on Israel, and in August Argentina’s president, Dr A $1m initiative was proposed To promote relations between Latin America and countries State of Genocide.
The list of similarities goes on. Trump has never been one to look down on corruption or nepotism – as long as it’s profiting – and Miley wasted no time appointing his own sister as secretary-general to the president. Kareena Mille has played a key role in one of the various scandals that have rocked her brother’s administration – scandals that threatened to jeopardize his party’s performance in Sunday’s midterms.
In August, a leaked audio recording showed Diego Spagnuolo, then head of Argentina’s National Disability Agency, discussing bribes allegedly pocketed by Karina Miley in exchange for a pharmaceutical contract to buy drugs for people with disabilities.
However, such an arrangement would only have disturbed the “radical-leftist sick culture”.
Now that midterm elections seem to have breathed new life into Miley’s free-market experiment, poor Argentines certainly have a lot to lose. But Washington has a lot to gain, as Trump explained in his victory speech after the results were announced: “We made a lot of money based on that election because bonds went up. Their entire credit rating went up.”
The President added that America is “not in it for the money, all the time”. Remember these words as Argentina are chained to greatness again.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.