Every Wednesday, thousands of retirees march in Buenos Aires [Argentina’s capital]. Often, they are also accompanied by trade unions, students, women and LGBTIQ activists. Many of these marches have been severely repressed, with police filmed violently beating elders, causing serious injury, and arresting hundreds. On June 18, up to a million people marched in the capital, with drone footage showing the giant Plaza de Mayo and nearby streets brimming with protesters.
The protests target a multitude of issues — from defending former left-leaning President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner against what is seen as political persecution, to demanding dignified retirements and protesting attacks to public services. Millions of Argentines are rejecting President Javier Milei’s policies — many of which mirror the anti-worker, anti-rights agenda of other far-right leaders like US President Donald Trump.
The protests are also a response to Milei’s bilious verbal attacks on women, journalists and social movements. A key breaking point that kicked off the current resistance came after Milei’s openly hateful speech in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
He argued for a cure to the “mental virus of woke ideology” that he said has “colonised institutions” and said that there is no gender inequality in work, rather men tend to “choose better paying professions”. “Radical feminism” is “redundant”, “wokeism” is promoting a “bloody, murderous abortion agenda” and “radical environmentalism”, he claimed. “In its most extreme forms, gender ideology is outright child abuse. They are paedophiles,” he said.
In response, a group of activists gathered in Buenos Aires’ historic Lezama Park, and formed the Antifascist, Antiracist, LGBTQI+ Assembly. The group organised the mass march on February 1 to reject what it called the politics of “plundering” and laid the groundwork for many mass mobilisations that would follow.
Since Milei took office in December 2023, his administration has implemented brutal budget cuts across key sectors — including education, healthcare, social development, culture and science. He has framed it as a war on the “political caste” and an effort to reduce “public spending”, but these policies have decimated purchasing power and sharply increased poverty.
The government has declared open war on journalists, unions, feminist collectives, cooperatives and opposition parties, with Milei pushing rhetoric steeped in misogyny, anti-rights sentiment and authoritarianism.
That rhetoric has fuelled hate crimes. A few months after Milei took office, on May 6 last year, four lesbian women were set on fire while sleeping in Barracas, and three of them died. The crime was understood as a chilling manifestation of the government-fostered climate of disinformation and intolerance. Resistance increased from that point, particularly led by feminist and LGBTIQ forces.
This organised resistance is far from confined to Buenos Aires. From Catamarca to Córdoba, and from Río Negro to Chaco, unions, Indigenous groups, neighbourhood assemblies and grassroots organisations remain on high alert and are organising regular protests, road blockades, community assemblies and cultural festivals in defence of public services and basic rights.
Women at the forefront
At the forefront of the resistance are the primary targets of Milei’s vitriol and policies: women.
“This government is profoundly anti-feminist,” Victoria Tesoriero, a sociologist and former undersecretary for political affairs in Argentina, told Truthdig. “It dismantled every policy that benefited us and now threatens to roll back the most important laws we’ve won.”
The government focused on women because “feminism is the only movement that has grown exponentially in recent years, both in numbers and in its ability to mobilize and shape public debate”, says Tesoriero, who is also the founder of Proyecto Generar, a pioneering feminist organisation that was among the first to track and measure political violence against women and gender-diverse activists.
Economist Candelaria Botto agreed, telling Truthdig, “Milei rose in response to the surge of feminist movements and a government that — at least in discourse — embraced inclusion.” That’s why, she said, his first action was to dismantle public policy frameworks aimed at gender equality, and the institutions that upheld such policies.
“His economic model is one of reduction in public services, decreasing the quality and quantity of services,” Botto said, adding, “This isn’t a neutral fiscal contraction. It’s a reallocation of funds: slashing essential services while debts and interest payments to financial elites continue to grow. The result? Ordinary people lose health, education and a dignified retirement, while the wealthy gain from tax cuts.”
In a 2021 report, Tesoriero’s team talked to female and gender-diverse activists, and found that 70% had experienced political violence. The study, conducted before Milei was president, concluded that, even then, the impact of verbal attacks was to reduce the sector’s political participation and representation.
She called the current resistance a “conservative counteroffensive” and pointed to the political and judicial persecution of Kirchner as a key example, saying, “The increase in violence toward women in politics — particularly against Cristina — is directly tied to the fact that she represents the most powerful opposition to this government. The week she announced her candidacy, she was immediately imprisoned.”
Kirchner was president of Argentina from 2007 to 2015, and vice president from 2019 to 2023. She was convicted in mid-June in a controversial corruption trial and banned from holding public office — a move widely seen as politically motivated.
Alongside this judicial offensive, Milei has publicly attacked feminist journalists like Julia Mengolini and María O’Donnell. Milei used X to publish at least 65 posts against Mengolini, for example. He did so while an artificial intelligence-generated video was circulating on social media about her, falsely depicting her as carrying out incest.
This confrontational political style that Milei uses against opponents strongly echo figures like Trump, with whom he has openly aligned himself. While Milei singles out journalists by name and mocks them publicly, Trump adopted a broader strategy, branding mainstream media outlets as “enemies of the people”.
‘We are a target’
Women are also playing a key role in public sector unions, whose workers have been directly attacked by Milei’s government.
“We’re an explicit target of this administration,” Clarisa Gambera, a union leader with ATE (Asociación Trabajadores del Estado, or Workers’ State Association) and a prominent feminist organiser, told Truthdig. The government’s attacks have included mass layoffs — many of them affecting workers hired through gender and diversity inclusion quotas — and efforts to delegitimise public employment altogether.
In response, public sector workers have launched a dual strategy — mobilising in the streets while building internal structures of care and solidarity to withstand the pressure and fearmongering being weaponised against them.
“We’ve made a point of strengthening feminism within our unionism … because the way we do politics is rooted in care,” Gambera said.
The feminist inter-union space has played a crucial role in building alliances across sectors. The February 1 antifascist march — one of the largest in recent memory — was a turning point, bringing together groups with different backgrounds.
“This government has declared war on us,” says Gambera, “and that has forced us to accelerate processes of defensive unity”. On June 3, during the annual Ni Una Menos mobilisation, unions also opened up their organising space to include pensioners. The slogan that emerged captures the spirit of this moment: “Uniting our struggles is the task at hand.”
Feminist trade unionists are also organising collective responses to repression. After the arrest of Kirchner, they convened a public assembly on June 10 in Buenos Aires with female leaders to denounce what they see as a threat to democracy.
Attacks on healthcare
One of the most sustained and powerful expressions of this multisector resistance is taking place at Hospital Garrahan, Argentina’s premier paediatric public hospital. With the 2025 budget frozen in nominal terms despite nearly 118% inflation, the hospital is being systematically starved — its supply chains crippled and wages rendered untenable. More than 220 professionals have resigned this year.
The stakes are high: the hospital’s defunding threatens the lives of countless children who depend on its high-quality free care.
In response, the Garrahan workforce has innovated and pushed public solidarity: rolling strikes, bicycle caravans, open festivals and a national march from Congress in mid-July. Cultural figures have joined them in a multisector movement to protect hospitals from austerity. Their message, broadcast in videos convoking the march, resonates: “When they attacked public universities, hundreds of thousands took to the streets. Now hospitals are under siege. They are attacking all of us.”
The cost of plunder
During his election campaign, Milei vowed to topple the so-called political caste. But those who have truly borne the weight of austerity aren’t corrupt politicians — they’re society’s most vulnerable people.
From January to July last year, the government cut the real value of pension funding by around 25.8% — even as inflation soared. Pensioners, along with essential medications and senior protections, have been recast as costs to be slashed.
In July, Congress passed a modest correction: a 7.2% pension increase (just A$30 per month), and a bump in emergency subsidies. Even combined, most retirees still receive only 379,000 pesos (A$454) per month. Rather than welcome the raise, Milei labelled it a “political act of desperation”, pledged to veto it, and vowed to sue Congress if his veto was overturned.
That veto pledge sparked spontaneous resistance. In Catamarca, three veteran activists — survivors of the 1970s repression — took to the plaza with signs condemning the veto.
Among them was Emperatriz “Monena” Márquez, an ex-political prisoner and human rights veteran. She told Truthdig that the struggle is intergenerational, and she underscored the plight of those who’ve worked under precarious conditions.
“This government doesn’t just ignore our rights — it erases them. We’re considered a burden,” Márquez said. Yet her generation remains defiant. Their demands include access to medicines, a strengthened public pension system, restoration of the state’s sustainability fund and co-housing policies for elders in precarious living situations.
Though Trump and Milei differ in their foreign policies —Trump’s trade protectionism versus Milei’s Washington consensus-style liberalisation — their shared commitment to blunting the state’s role is telling. Both champion huge tax breaks for the rich while withdrawing support for services.
Faced with a government that weaponises austerity, Argentina’s streets have become not just fierce battlegrounds, but also spaces for creation. In organising, mobilising and caring for one another, Argentines are both challenging any erasure of what happened in the past and defending their future.
[Abridged from Truthdig. Camila Parodi is a social scientist from the University of Buenos Aires, an editor at Marcha and a staff writer at LatFem.]