While Argentina settles in after electing Javier Milei as president, Roger Waters has just filled two stadiums in Buenos Aires in which he called to “resist against fascism”, denounce the “genocide” of the Israeli army in Palestine and sing some of the hits with which he turned Pink Floyd into one of the definitive bands of the last century. Waters, 80, sang this Tuesday and Wednesday in Buenos Aires under surveillance by a prosecutor and without being able to reserve a hotel room after complaints from the Delegation of Argentine Israeli Associations, which asked to suspend his concerts for “promoting hate speech.” The former leader of Pink Floyd sang the same, and captivated thousands in the week in which a country exhausted by the economic crisis and corruption has just embraced the extreme right. Or he did it halfway.
Buenos Aires applauded him without concessions for each of his successes, but received his political denunciations more coldly. Waters had a response ready. He had not written it especially for his concerts this Tuesday and Wednesday in the Argentine capital, but the message that he launched on the speakers before each Show fell flat: “If you’re one of those who say, ‘I like Pink Floyd, but I can’t stand Roger’s politics,’ you’d do well to fuck off and go to the bar right now.”
On Wednesday, at his farewell to Buenos Aires, no one left the stadium. Between messages of “stopping the genocide” and respecting human rights in Palestine, complaints against police violence from Argentina to Brazil or the United States, and praise for the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Waters opened the recital with Comfortably Numb and other hits The Wall. Then he paused between the applause to vent.
“I was in this beautiful city many times and made music for a wonderful audience. “Despite all that history of music and love and warm nights, for some reason the hotel owners in this town won’t let me stay!” he said, after the city’s two big hotel chains denied him a stay. fourth or they will cancel his reservation due to his “anti-Semitic messages” and cast doubt on the veracity of the Hamas attack on the border of the Gaza Strip on October 7. “I know well what I feel in my heart and I have not had a single anti-Semitic thought in my entire life,” Waters said. “What I condemn is what the Israeli government does and I will continue to do it because it was wrong from the beginning.”
Waters called to resist fascism, capitalism and to call on world leaders to “sit down over a beer” to ask them to desist from leading the world into a “third world war.” He received more applause, perhaps because there was an agenda of his own in the stands.
Buenos Aires is experiencing tense days after Javier Milei swept Sunday’s elections and gave Peronism one of its worst electoral defeats. The ultra got 56% of the votes, and in his victory speech he called for an end to “the impoverishing model of the present State” and an adjustment of public spending “without gradualism or lukewarmness.” Many Argentines chose him by chance: between a Peronism that leaves the Government with 142% year-on-year inflation, salaries that are worth less every day and four out of ten people in poverty, and the leap into the unknown with the help of a economist who calls himself an “anarcho-capitalist” and promises to “privatize everything that can be privatized,” the majority preferred the latter.
Milei rose up with promises to “kick the ass” of the usual politicians, set fire to the Central Bank to stop inflation, privatize health, education and public companies and even launched against the consensus on the violence of the military regime of a country that on December 10, the day it assumes power, celebrates 40 years since the end of the dictatorship. Many of his voters claim that they did not choose him for that reason, that they elected him “looking for change.” Between their hope and the anguish of those who did not vote for him, the country coexists again.
On Wednesday, during an intermission in which Roger Waters rested to sing other hits again, half of the River Plate stadium rose up in harangues of “He who doesn’t jump, voted for Milei!” and “Milei, trash, you are the dictatorship!” The other half stayed in their seats, and after minutes of chanting against the president-elect, both groups waited for the fight to continue. Show.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS América newsletter and receive all the key information on current events in the region.
#Roger #Waters #calls #resist #fascism #Argentines