PASO SUSPENSION ON CARDS
The suspension of this year’s PASO primaries was approved by the Chamber of Deputies on Thursday afternoon by a 162-55 vote with 28 abstentions. The real battle had actually been won at the plenary committee meeting on Tuesday when with the unexpected help of four Peronist deputies from Catamarca and Santiago del Estero, the government managed to gather enough signatures to have the bill debated on the House floor in Thursday’s session. Governors Gerardo Zamora (Santiago del Estero) and Raúl Jalil (Catamarca) had recently met with Economy Minister Luis Caputo, reaching agreement to advance public works in both provinces. But presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni denied that there had been any negotiation while pointing out that removal of the PASO primaries would save Argentines some US$200 million.
ARGENTINA ABANDONS WHO
After the government’s controversial midweek exit from the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the footsteps of Donald Trump with President Javier Milei blaming “Stone Age lockdowns,” Deputy Health Minister Cecilia Loccisano ruled out the move affecting health programmes or the vaccination calendar with the Ministry’s financing and international cooperation including funding from the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) still intact. The official dismissed the WHO as “a political caste imposing recipes which do not work” while the exit will “recover our autonomy to decide what is best for our people … “to implement policies adapted to our local context,” concluding: “We’re changing the Argentine health system completely to end over 20 years of emergencies and more than 70 years of scams.”
MARCHING AGAINST MILEI
The LGTBIQ+ collective ended up being a minority component of the anti-fascist march they organised last Saturday to protest President Javier Milei’s recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos when he had equated homosexuality with paedophilia, given the heavy presence of opposition politicians, social organisations and trade unions. Estimates of the crowd in Plaza de Mayo in a summer weekend ranged from 20,000 to 80,000 while there were parallel protests in Córdoba, Santa Fe and Mendoza, among other provinces. Among the Peronist politicians joining the march were Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof, deputy Máximo Kirchner, Quilmes Mayor Mayra Mendoza and Senators Eduardo ‘Wado’ de Pedro and Mariano Recalde, among others, while leftist Frente de Izquierda leaders like Myriam Bregman and Nicolás del Caño were also present. City Hall questioned Security Minister Patricia Bullrich for not applying her usual anti-picket protocol to the march. On the same afternoon Presidential Chief-of-Staff Karina Milei was in Villa Devoto recruiting party members for La Libertad Avanza.
ALBERTO IN COURT
Ex-president Alberto Fernández made court appearances in the first two days of the week in two different cases – state insurance fraud on Monday and gender violence against his former partner Fabiola Yáñez on Tuesday. In the former case he was more interested in challenging federal judge Julián Ercolini for “manifest hostility” than in answering the accusations of having made state insurance contracts a Banco Nación Seguros monopoly in order to steer commissions to crony middlemen. In the latter case he denied ever having bashed his former partner, saying that if anything, she hit him while dismissing the whole accusation as attempted extortion. Again he had harsh words for Ercolini and refused to answer questions beyond submitting a 200-page writ.
CONTROLS FOR A WHILE
In a Monday interview President Javier Milei announced that the ‘cepo’ currency and capital controls would end on the New Year’s Day of 2026 even without the International Monetary Fund but that they could be lifted earlier with IMF remittances (US$11 billion is the Economy Ministry target). Milei expressed optimism on this front with the convergence between parallel and official exchange rates, also describing the dialogue with the IMF as “highly constructive and positive.” The Central Bank started the month by halving the crawling peg monthly devaluation from two to one percent, as well as cutting annual interest rates from 32 to 29 percent while on Monday the government made its first debt repayment of the year to the IMF, amounting to US$640 million. In the same interview, Milei stuck to his Davos guns, saying: “Gender ideology carried to extremes leads to abuse and is thus paedophilia,” also blasting Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof as “useless” due to the recent crime upsurge in Greater Buenos Aires. Later this month (February 22) Milei will be returning to the United States for a Conservative Policy Action Conference (CPAC) when he will be meeting both US President Donald Trump and tycoon Elon Musk with hopes of pursuing a free trade agreement with the superpower.
JOB SHRINKAGE
The first year of the Javier Milei Presidency has seen 185,000 formal jobs lost with 119,000 shed in the private sector and 51,000 in a public sector now reduced from 3.484 to 3.433 million (with domestic service accounting for the remaining 15,000). The grand total of the workforce, including the self-employed, has thus fallen from 13.392 to 13.281 million. The average gross wage last November was 1,423,257 pesos, 172.8 percent up from the November of 2023 as against inflation of 166 percent.
SAME DOG, DIFFERENT COLLAR
While her job remains basically the same, Security Minister Patricia Bullrich is now National Security Minister Bullrich “with a change of paradigm to make life, liberty and the property of people the fundamental pillars” of her work, according to Decree 59/2025 published in the Official Gazette last Tuesday. The names of the other seven ministries (Foreign Affairs, Defence, Economy, Justice, Health, Human Capital and Deregulation & State Transformation) remain the same. The Press Secretariat (which had been headed by the recently fired Eduardo Serenellini) is now merged into the new Secretariat of Communication and Media. Last Thursday Bullrich’s policy of militarising the frontier in tandem with Defence Minister Luis Petri ran into a collision course with the Church Synod, which described it as “boosting xenophobia or racism” while pointing out that “toughening the Argentine frontiers replicates the strategies of [United States President Donald] Trump while contradicting the message of fraternity promoted by Pope Francis.” The Catholic bishops warned against the risks of criminalising immigrants, insisting on receiving them “with dignity and respect.”
GENDER TRANSITIONS
The government has decided to amend the Gender Identity Law (2012) by prohibiting hormone treatment and sex change surgery for those aged under 18, presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni announced at a press conference in the Casa Rosada on Wednesday afternoon, while there will also be a crackdown against prisoners seeking a transfer from men’s to women’s prisons on the grounds of a change in gender perception.
FEMICIDE ALMOST DAILY
Femicide was almost a daily crime in Argentina last month with 28 women (four of them technically suicides) falling victim to gender violence in January, according to the latest report of La Casa del Encuentro’s Observatory of Femicides. Almost as many children (27) were left without a mother while 70 percent of the women were murdered in their own homes. Seven of the women had previously denounced their killers or obtained restraining orders.
VETERAN PHOTOGRAPHER RETIRES
Veteran presidential photographer Víctor Bugge has decided to call it a day after a career of almost half a century beginning with the military dictator Jorge Videla in 1978, presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni announced on Wednesday. Apart from virtually every president since then (with the exception of the two-day term of Ramón Puerta in late 2001), Bugge’s photographs included popes, Queen Elizabeth II, Lady Di, football superstars and the Rolling Stones being hosted by Carlos Menem. He inherited the tricks of the trade from his father Miguel Bugge, a photographer for La Nación newspaper.
LINESMAN ASSAULTED
Violence reared its ugly head again in football last Tuesday during the First Division match between Godoy Cruz and Talleres de Córdoba, when a corner flagpole hurled by an angry fan hit linesman Diego Martín in the forehead, cutting him badly and stunning him enough to prevent his continuation. The referee Yael Falcón Pérez promptly suspended the still goalless match while Martín was taken to hospital.
FATAL WILDFIRES
Wildfires that have been raging across multiple sites in Argentine since December, mobilising hundreds of firefighters, had destroyed more than 25,000 hectares as of Thursday, according to official data. "It is certain" that this is one of the worst seasons for forest loss in a long time, said Hernán Giardini, coordinator of Greenpeace Argentina’s Forests campaign, who warned: "And February is still ahead." The fires have left one person dead and around 100 homes destroyed, with more than 1,000 people evacuated across the provinces of Neuquén, Río Negro, and Chubut.
Comments