What recent pension clashes reveal about Javier Milei’s political project – and Argentina
When Argentina is discussed in international news, it’s often as an economic basket case. (To what extent this is part of a narrative which explains – or is used to justify – the draconian neoliberal policies pursued by Javier Milei is something you’ll have to judge for yourself, Dear Reader).
Much less talked about is the fact that Argentina is one of few places where social movements and democratic movements from below continue to be a factor in the nation’s politics. (Ni Una Menos—the feminist grassroots movement which originated as a spontaneous protest against gendered violence, and whose greatest win was the approval of state-sanctioned abortion law in 2020—must be the most known and inspiring recent case in point.) An article by Macarena Romero and Diego Murzi with photographs by Nicolás Suárez, entitled ‘Un tiro a la democracia’ (Taking Aim at Democracy), perfectly illustrates this history, bookended by the horrific story of Pablo Grillo, a local photojournalist.
On the one hand, it chronicles the targeted attack on Grillo by the police. It details the way Grillo sustained severe head injuries, and even lost brain mass, from a tear gas projectile shot at him whilst he was covering clashes over pension cuts. It also notes how Grillo was subsequently singled out by the interior minister Patricia “El Pato” Bullrich, scapegoating him as a dangerous “militant”. On the other hand, the piece makes clear how the protests are themselves the expression of a long history of militancia; just as the police repression with which they were met forms part of a historical pattern, coherent with Milei’s stated objective to crack down on any form of dissent.
(Translator notes that not long after these clashes took place, on March 24, the day that Argentinians commemorate the victims of the military dictatorship which ran the country from 1976 to 1983, a video was circulated by the government ramming the point home. In it, right wing ‘intellectual’ Agustín Laje expounded the laughable, historically illiterate thesis according to which state terror which resulted in the disappearance of roughly 30,000 people was a commensurate, justified response to the threat presented by a Peronist, left-wing guerrilla group, the Montoneros.)
By combining the personal narratives of two activist retirees with invaluable additional context, the piece in particular explains the strange alliance of jubilados and hinchas – Argentinian slang for pensioners and football fans – spearheading the protests. The alliance was not simply the result of a common love of Maradona—who, as a defender of the working class, is nonetheless an iconic point of reference both on and off the streets.
Rather, this heterogenous coalition is the result of shared grievances deriving from Milei’s austerity measures, and his disciplinarian attempt to tear apart the fabric of Argentinian society. As the article makes clear, pensioners have long been subject to policies that have eroded their purchasing power in a country plagued by inflation – but Milei’s shock therapy has hit them the hardest. At the same time, football clubs—which in Argentina are still run as non-profit members’ associations and, as such, are one of the main expressions of civil society and democratic governance—have long been under the threat of privatisation. Talks of turning them into private companies ripe for foreign investment have only intensified under Milei. One of his first actions as new president in 2023—as if to announce regime change in the most symbolically charged way possible—was to publicly endorse his political ally, Mauricio Macri who was running in the vote to become the new president of the Boca Juniors sports’ cub on precisely such a promise. (Macri lost to the incumbent, legendary Argentinian number 10 and popular idol Riquelme; Milei was booed by club members when he went to cast his own vote).
The article also details how football fans have been subjected to stricter security measures and police violence in an attempt to curb the power and reach of barras bravas (groups of ultra football fans which have long metastasised into criminal syndicates). And how Bullrich has threatened to extend these measures, including lifelong stadium bans, as a way to scare ordinary football fans away from expressing solidarity with pensioners, delegitimising their political activism as the work of ‘thugs’.
One should be careful not to over-romanticise faraway struggles, but the piece clearly points to how central grassroots organising is to Argentinian democracy, and why Milei might be so adamant about extirpating it in all its forms.
BS
This article, written by Macarena Romero and Diego Muziz, with photographs by Nicolás Suárez, was originally published in Spanish in Revista Anfibia under the title Un Tiro a la Democracia on March 13 2025. You can find the article here.
Macarena Romero is a political scientist and Diego Muniz is a social scientist in Argentina. Nicolás Suárez is a freelance photographer based in Buenos Aires.
Revista Anfibia is an Argentinian digital publication and media platform founded in 2012 in the National University of San Martín, covering all kinds of issues with exuberance and creativity.
