The Argentine Government's War On Inflation Is Also A War On Care

Forbes

30-05-2025

Dishing out food at a protest in front of Argentina's new Ministry of Human Capital, which has ... More refused to supply food to community kitchens. (Photo by Nicolas Suarez)
Marina Joski has a lot on her plate. The mother of three (and grandmother of one) also cares for her own mother.
As for paid work, Joski is a health promoter—someone who provides information and support about health. A leader of the union UTEP, she coordinates community health spaces throughout Argentina.
But she's become even busier since Argentine president Javier Milei started imposing swinging cuts across the social sector in late 2023. Joski's salary shrank. Her family has drastically cut down on the amount of meat they eat.
Joski has had to take on three additional jobs. She calls this a 'strategy of multiple employment: dedicating a little less time to what we love to do.' Added to this is the extra workload of the primary job she loves, because the government has also ended a number of medicine subsidies and public healthcare programs.
Joski isn't the only one now working four jobs. Political scientist Verónica Gago is currently teaching at four public universities, including the University of Buenos Aires and the National University of San Martín. Her salary quickly dropped in purchasing power after Milei took office and devalued the Argentine peso by over 50%. 'The gap between prices and salaries is really dramatic,' Gago reports. 'We have European prices for food, for example.'
People like Joski, who work with some of Argentina's neediest, have had to stretch their diminishing resources to painful lengths. Community kitchens have been selling ice cubes, and making meals of just paprika in hot water, as they struggle to stay open and keep people fed. Another early action of Milei's government was to stop distribution of food to community kitchens.
This 'economic violence' is only part of the story. It's been accompanied by what Joski calls 'symbolic violence': a daily litany of insults, harassment, and accusations about community-based and public-sector work. Critics in an increasingly polarized political environment claim that community workers, health promoters, public researchers, and others are wasteful or anti-individual. For people like Joski, it's hard to be considered a public enemy for trying to help others.
The symbolic violence especially targets women and non-binary people. One way is through the dismantling of care policies: those that help keep people free from hunger, illness, and violence. It is largely women who provide such care, and often women and girls who need this social support because of financial vulnerability and other reasons.
According to the Center for Legal and Social Studies, a Buenos Aires-based human rights organization, only 5 out of 50 care policies now remain in place in Argentina. Meanwhile, the income gap between men and women has risen from 21% to 26.3% in one year.
The Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity was one of nine ministries shuttered as Milei razed the government. And the federal government has stopped distributing medication abortion, leaving it up to the provinces. This has led to soaring prices and uneven availability. 'Historically the national government was the one that purchased inputs at very good prices in terms of cost and efficiency,' de la Vega explains. 'The provinces today are not in a position to address this from one year to the next, when at the same time all the resources that came from the national government in all spheres have been reduced.'
The diminution of support for reproductive health has emboldened harassers of women seeking abortions, as well as people calling for an end to the hard-fought right to abortion altogether. The new government's policies have created a double bind on abortion that makes no one happy: the policies have made it harder for women to end pregnancies, but have also led to more abortions because more women cannot afford to have children.
The symbolic and economic violence has also translated into a greater tolerance for physical violence. The government 'has argued that there is no specific violence against women and girls, that gender-based violence doesn't exist,' de la Vega explains. This worldview has helped justify cuts to services that especially helped victims of gender-based violence, such as major layoffs at a helpline and reductions to a program that supported women seeking to escape violent situations. Above all, de la Vega says, 'the agencies that functioned to prevent and punish gender violence have been eliminated.' These vanished services are part of what Gago describes as 'state anti-feminism.'
However, one rare victory amidst the battering of women's rights has been the retention of femicide as a specific category in the Penal Code. Argentina's president and justice minister had called for this to be removed. But following enormous protests, officials have stopped threatening to eliminate femicide as a specific crime. In 2024, 295 women and girls were recorded as being killed by men for gender-related reasons.
Protesters with the Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) movement hold the state responsible for femicide ... More (Photo by)
To be fair, Milei's policies have been popular with some sectors. Inflation is down overall according to official sources (although the methodology is disputed). Inflation has diminished so much that the industrial gas company AirLiquide excluded Argentina from some Q1 2025 sales reporting, so as not to distort the global results.
Many voters in Argentina believed that firm action was needed to correct course on Argentina's deeply unstable economy; now, other leaders in Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. are seeking to copy Milei's chainsaw approach to public spending.
However, poverty and household debt have risen instead. This includes child poverty, which was already high and climbed further in the first few months of Milei's presidency.
Thousands of people have lost jobs, wages, and pension pots. The pension losses have occurred through the cutting of an exemption that allowed people to retire without having contributed to social security for 30 years. This exemption enabled informal workers and women who had had career gaps due to childrearing, for instance, to retire with some security.
Health has also deteriorated. Joski says, 'between the lack of medication delivery and malnutrition, there's an overdose of' carbohydrates and fats instead of protein. This has led to more cases of stroke, high blood pressure, and diabetes. 'And at the same time they're cutting off medication distribution, they've also defunded all mental health services that working-class people could have access to,' she reports. So as daily life has gotten tougher, the ability to cope has also dwindled. Substance abuse, mental health problems, and suicides are rising in poor neighborhoods, according to Joski.
Some of the painful cuts to public spending have been in the interest of securing a new $20-billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), approved in April and with an initial review planned for June. Past IMF-driven austerity measures in Argentina, including the fund's biggest ever loan in 2018, have been deeply unpopular. Yet the IMF expects Argentina to maintain their relationship on its current terms. In April, IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva controversially said, 'the country is going to go to elections, as you know, in October. And it is very important that they do not derail the will for change. So far, we do not see that.'
The IMF declined to respond to specific questions, referring instead to a staff report that praises the Argentine authorities' work to stabilize and grow the economy. This report projects that public debt, as a percentage of GDP, will dramatically shrink from 85.3% in 2024 to 38.2% in 2035. As of January, Argentina owed $40.6 billion to the IMF alone. In 2025, 18.6% of that amount is expected to go to paying off IMF debt.
No one disputes that decisive action was needed to address Argentina's staggering inflation. But Gago doesn't think that the current government's actions will ultimately resolve inflation, if it remains dependent on external debt that needs to be repaid in dollars, and does not address structural elements like rising housing prices. Indeed, the real estate sector has been one of the winners of the government's deregulation push, Gago says. In this 'dual economy,' there is polarization between the ultra-rich and those who are staying or becoming poor. Wealth is increasingly being transferred from workers to large corporations.
'Every day we lose rights, and there's less and less budget to implement public policy,' de la Vega warns.