Javier Milei’s tenth international trip as Argentine president will be his first to South America. After his repeated visits to the United States and Europe, he makes his debut in the region with an agenda marked more by his ideological affinities than by state interests. Milei will participate this weekend in Brazil at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) along with other Latin American far-right leaders such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Chile’s José Antonio Kast. From there he will return to Buenos Aires instead of going to Asunción, where the summit of heads of state of Mercosur, the trade bloc made up of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, is being held on Monday.
Milei will leave on Saturday with his entourage on the presidential plane bound for Camboriú, the beach town in the Brazilian state of Santa Caterina, where the ultra-right forum will take place. The Argentine president will give a speech on Saturday and the following day he will meet with the provincial governor and Brazilian businessmen before returning to Buenos Aires.
This itinerary allows Milei to avoid a meeting with his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, with whom he has had a tense relationship since the election campaign, which did not improve after taking power. So far, Lula and Milei have only exchanged a fleeting greeting away from the cameras at the last G7 summit in Italy. Last week, the Argentine president again called Lula a “communist” and “corrupt” in response to his request for an apology.
Presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni said that Milei’s “busy schedule” will prevent him from traveling to Asunción on Monday. “We have no problem showing up anywhere where Lula or any other president is,” he said at a press conference.
The Argentine president’s private trips in a context of public spending cuts and economic crisis have been the subject of harsh criticism from the Argentine opposition, which has even taken them to court. Milei has visited the United States four times as head of state, but has not met with the authorities of that country; he has been to Spain twice without meeting with the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, with whom he has been involved in a verbal escalation that led to the diplomatic crisis that has left the Embassy in Buenos Aires headless for more than a month.
“Milei presented himself as a very disruptive president and foreign policy is one of the few spheres where he can continue to do so,” says Juan Negri, director of the International Studies degree at Torcuato di Tella University. “Milei is a radical person in the ideological aspect and he makes a combative foreign policy for domestic consumption, to please his followers who like to see an aggressive Milei, who is not imbued with political correctness,” says Negri.
Disinterest in Latin America
Milei will travel to Brazil after having made a 180-degree turn in Argentina’s foreign policy. He has broken with the balance of his predecessors between the two great powers in conflict, the United States and China, and has opted for an unconditional alignment with Washington and its partner in the Middle East, Israel.
The Argentine president’s gaze is almost exclusively set on the Northern Hemisphere. The only Latin American country he has visited so far has been El Salvador, where he traveled to attend the re-inauguration of Nayib Bukele as president. In addition to excluding neighboring countries from his trips abroad, he has had verbal clashes with numerous regional leaders, such as Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, Bolivia’s Luis Arce, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Chile’s Gabriel Boric.
“The current situation is that of a president who is isolated in the region, who does not consider it a disadvantage because he does not consider it important,” says Negri. This political scientist maintains that the lack of experience of his foreign minister, Diana Mondino, further complicates Argentina’s dialogue with its regional peers. Even so, he believes that commercial ties remain unchanged: “For many businessmen and women, if there is guaranteed profit, everything else is fireworks.”
Milei, a 53-year-old economist who entered politics in 2021, arrives at the CPAC summit as one of the most popular presidents in the region. His positive image, which is around 50%, has suffered little from the severe cuts in public spending ordered by his government. The adjustment has allowed him to balance the public accounts and begin to reduce the pace of inflation, but at the cost of slowing economic activity – it contracted by 1.7% year-on-year in April – and increasing unemployment and poverty.
Middle class decline
The city of Buenos Aires is the richest in Argentina, but even its inhabitants have suffered a drastic reduction in income levels in the last year. The Buenos Aires middle class shrank from 49.2% to 37.4% between the first quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024. The number of destitute people, that is, those with insufficient income to buy food, almost doubled, to represent 15.3% of the population. The government claims that Argentina has bottomed out and has already begun to grow, but so far the indicators contradict that message.
The government hopes that the economy will be reactivated with the arrival of large investments in the energy, mining and technological sectors thanks to the tax benefits contemplated in the Ley Bases approved two weeks ago. This Friday, the government announced the inauguration of a lithium production plant in the north of the country through an investment of 800 million dollars from the American company Eramine Sudamérica.
After six months of back-and-forth in Congress, the recently approved law strengthens Milei’s power by granting him legislative powers for a year and gives him many of the tools he requested to reduce the Argentine State and deregulate the economy. The president has just created a ministry specifically for this purpose, that of Deregulation and Transformation of the State. At its head is the economist Federico Sturzenegger, an old acquaintance of Argentine politics for his previous participation in the administrations of Fernando de la Rúa and Mauricio Macri.
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