The Argentine railways are among the favorite victims of the budget cuts applied by the Government of Javier Milei and, at the same time, they are part of the group of public companies that the far-right president intends to leave in the hands of the private sector. The destiny of the trains has always run parallel to the ups and downs of the country and today, after a decade under state administration, Milei’s liberal-libertarian preaching directs the tracks towards the market as a terminal station. But a train crash on May 10 in Buenos Aires, with at least 55 passengers injured, warned that the discussion is not abstract. Argentina knows it well: the 51 dead and 789 injured left by the so-called Once tragedy, a train accident that occurred in 2012, are still present in social memory.
On the morning of last Friday, May 10, a passenger train was heading towards the Buenos Aires station of Palermo, but it never arrived. On a bridge, it hit a stopped van and derailed. The automatic signaling that would have prevented the crash did not work because, according to railway workers, the system cables had been stolen weeks before and had never been replaced.
The Argentine State manages five of the seven metropolitan railway lines, which concentrate 85% of the 335 million passengers transported annually. The other two lines are concessioned to private companies. Since Milei took office, the railways dependent on the state-owned SOFSE are among the areas most affected by the fiscal adjustment. While the Government carried out a real year-on-year reduction of 32% of all public spending in the first four months of the year (as reported by the Argentine Institute of Fiscal Analysis), the sending of resources to the railway network fell by 59% between December and April, compared to the same period of the previous year. Official data indicate that it went from 444,000 million pesos in 2023 (about 444 million dollars at the current exchange rate) to 181,000 million in 2024. A report from the Civil Association for Equality and Justice showed that the largest cut, greater than 90 %, the items allocated to railway infrastructure suffer.
In fact, a week before the crash, on May 3, the authorities of the state-owned SOFSE had unsuccessfully demanded the urgent allocation of the funds necessary to guarantee “minimum safety standards.” After the accident, the Government announced that it will declare a railway emergency to accelerate service demands.
Round-trip tickets
That same Friday the 10th, while there were still injured people undergoing medical examination, the Minister of the Interior, Guillermo Francos, advocated privatizing the trains. “The need for capital participation and private control is important. It is clear that the railway situation is bad,” he said. In last year’s election campaign, Milei had announced that his plan to scrap the State includes privatizing public transportation, particularly rail, to reduce the deficit. “The State should get out of the way because the private sector does it much better,” he repeated his leading idea. The initiative integrates the so-called “base law” that the Government presented in Congress, where it already had half a sanction in the Chamber of Deputies and is now being debated in the Senate.
![load the bus and take the train in Constitución](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/J2TG7RDPGRHDLGG2PVGAKI73LM.jpg?auth=7f2cda67256b6ac5c6f0e69f9bdf622cdf428ab46a2f993bea33c8386b6a426d&width=414)
The Argentine railway network is shaped like a funnel that starts in the fertile fields and ends in the City of Buenos Aires, the country’s main port, a design tailored to the agro-export model. After an origin based on State investment, the network was controlled by English and French capital until, in the 1940s, Juan Domingo Perón nationalized it. That regime lasted until the 1990s, when Carlos Menem, the president who combined Peronism and neoliberalism, and whom Milei adores, handed over exploitation to private companies. The return to the hands of the State began to take shape around 2008, during the Government of Cristina Kirchner, and materialized after the Once tragedy, which symbolized the failure of the concessions and was associated with a plot of corruption and lack of controls.
“The system began to recover in 2015 and continued to improve until the pandemic, although without reaching the levels of efficiency it had between 1995 and 1997. Now all the indicators have fallen again,” explains Verónica Pérez, researcher at Conicet and the National University of San Martín, specialized in transportation systems. “The new Government cut transfers to railway companies. The problem is that decisions are being made from a fiscal point of view, without a comprehensive plan that takes into account people’s mobility needs,” she adds.
Layoffs and risks
The first draft of the “base law” that Milei presented sought the total privatization of the railway system, including the infrastructure. Without opposition support, that proposal foundered in Congress. The second version of the project, the one currently being debated, only promotes privatizing or concessioning the companies SOFSE (that is, the operation of the five lines in state hands) and Belgrano Cargas (rail freight transport). “In the world, except for the special case of Japan, railway systems are state-owned or have concessions. There is no rule for which ones work best. But a general characteristic is that States do not get rid of infrastructure, because it is a strategic asset,” says Pérez, a doctor in Social Sciences.
The different unions that represent the 30,000 workers in the railway system hold a similar position. “We are not against concessioning services, but we want private companies to invest. What we are against is the delivery of the infrastructure,” remarks Agustín Special, leader of La Fraternidad, the train drivers’ union. The trade associations have declared themselves on alert regarding the dismissals of railway workers: they warn that the Government intends to reduce the staff by 15%. The layoffs have already begun and they did so precisely in the area of infrastructure. “They fired 130 workers as if they were using a chainsaw, without evaluating performance or capabilities,” says Ricardo Banegas, from the Technical School of the drivers union.
The researcher and teacher Verónica Pérez highlights a key difference between the privatization process promoted by Milei and the model applied thirty years ago in Argentina by Menem: “In the concessions of the 1990s, the State reserved the role of regulator and supervisor. Today none of that is considered. What is proposed is a total withdrawal of the State. Railways are in deficit all over the world, which is why they require subsidies and control of their use. History teaches us that concession models without an active State with the capacity to regulate and supervise lead to failure and put people’s lives at risk.”
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