It was a long night in Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo on Wednesday. For several weeks, the country’s pensioners have mobilized every Wednesday against the economic policies of far-right president Javier Milei. Retirees are among the first victims of the drastic decline in the country’s standard of living due to inflation and budget cuts. But on March 12, the mobilization took on a new dimension when Security Minister Patricia Bullrich mobilized nearly 1,000 police to repress the protest, arresting over 100 people and injuring dozens more.

For several years, pensioners have been gathering in the center of Argentina’s capital to demonstrate against the rising cost of living and insufficient pensions. Since Milei came to power at the end of 2023, pensions have been frozen; meanwhile, the peso has been devalued by 52 percent. The week before, on March 5, the police escalated the repression, attacking a retiree who is also a member of one of Argentina’s popular soccer clubs. In response, several clubs and unions — in particular the transport and aeronautics unions — called on their ranks to mobilize in solidarity on March 12. Their message was clear: “Sooner or later we are all pensioners.”

The police quickly provoked the demonstrators, charging the procession and cracking down with tear gas, waves of rubber bullets, water cannons, and mass arrests. The images of a policeman hitting a pensioner on the head with a baton and knocking her to the ground reflect not only the ferocity of the repression, but also the crisis facing the far-right libertarian government as it struggles to impose its agenda. Despite the media’s lies — reports minimizing the protests and saying they were made up of violent soccer hooligans — thousands of people joined the protest throughout the day and well into the small hours of the night. In the face of the repression, healthcare workers organized in La Posta de Salud treated hundreds of people during the protest.

Among those injured is journalist Pablo Grillo, who is in critical condition. In response, the photojournalists union organized a press conference to denounce the repression and demand Bullrich’s resignation.

Bullrich’s forces continued their intimidation throughout the evening, arresting 150 demonstrators. The state did everything it could to criminalize the demonstration, describing it as a riot by hooligans — including maneuvers to falsely incriminate protesters and particularly the organized Left. In one video, a police officer can be seen leaving a firearm on the ground to fabricate false evidence against protesters. Police dropped fake leaflets signed by “Frente de Izquierda” (notably misspelled) designed to convince people that the Left wanted to deliberately provoke police violence. This is a major police and state deception.

The government even sent police to intimate people taking refuge inside one of the offices and organizing spaces of el Partido de Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS, the Party of Socialist Workers — Left Voice’s sister organization in Argentina), keeping people inside. Despite this and other provocations, the protest in the city center moved to neighborhoods across Buenos Aires, with many people taking part in cacerolazos (pots and pans protests) to continue the fight.

Milei Weakened

After more than a year as president, Milei is facing the most significant political crisis of his career. As Fernando Scolnik analyzes in La Izquierda Diario,

With its political credibility battered after the crypto scam, and with hatred growing among numerous sectors for its policies of austerity, repression, and discrimination, the government encountered a surge in the will to fight among thousands of people willing to resist Patricia Bullrich’s brutal and indiscriminate repression.

A few weeks ago, the Milei promoted a new cryptocurrency that turned out to be a scam, and the president is now being questioned about his involvement.

Living conditions for millions of people in Argentina have also deteriorated dramatically in recent months. For several weeks now, the city of Buenos Aires has been affected by massive power cuts due to the extreme heat and cuts in subsidies to energy companies, which have passed them on to consumers. Additionally, the government has shown its incompetence in the management of the massive fires in the south of the country and catastrophic floods in the city of Bahía Blanca. 

If the government manages to avoid explosive inflation, it will be mainly thanks to massive loans from the International Monetary Fund and a deliberate policy of recession through brutal attacks on state services and social spending. In this sense, yesterday’s demonstrations marked the entry of new sectors of the population into the mobilization against Milei and a change in the social mood, with apathy giving way to general anger against the government and police repression.

On Wednesday, a few hours before the start of the demonstration, Milei suffered yet another setback in parliament. The ruling party was unable to prevent a vote on the commission’s request to investigate the cryptocurrency scam, although the government managed to obtain the support of part of the traditional right and sectors of Peronism — who are the self-proclaimed opposition to Milei — to try to prevent it from taking place. On the same day, Milei traveled to Bahía Blanca, a city hit by floods that left more than 100 people missing. The president and his security minister were met with insults from residents denouncing the government’s allocation of a measly 2.5 percent of the funding required for the reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure and housing.

“What do you have to hide with the Libra scam that you don’t want investigated?” demanded PTS deputy Nicolás del Caño in congress. 

Together with the other deputies and former deputies of the Left Front – Unity (FIT), Nicolas del Caño and Myriam Bregman were at the forefront of the mobilization and denunciation of the repression. After leaving the Congress to join the demonstrators, Bregman denounced the huge police deployment ordered by Bullrich, accusing them of wanting to establish an “authoritarian regime” and assuring that she would continue to support the mobilization of pensioners.

Last night’s demonstrations show the response of the working classes to Milei’s austerity. The demonstrators stood up to the repression and massive police violence. While it is too early to say whether this is a game changer for the crisis-ridden government, the words of one demonstrator show the way: “Let everyone join us, they’ve just lit the fuse!”

This article is a translated and adapted version of an article that originally appeared in French on March 13, 2025 in Révolution Permanente.