Buenos Aires, Argentina — Argentina’s largest unions launched one of their fiercest challenges to President Javier Milei’s libertarian government, organizing a massive general strike on Thursday that led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights and the paralysis of key bus, rail and metro lines. The main avenues and streets, as well as the main transport terminals, were left eerily empty.
The 24-hour strike against Milei’s controversial austerity measures and deregulation push threatened to paralyze the nation of 46 million people as banks, businesses and state agencies closed in protest.
Most teachers were unable to attend school and parents kept their children at home. Garbage collectors left their jobs, as did healthcare workers, except those in emergency rooms.
The government said disruptions to transportation service would prevent about 6.6 million people from getting to work. This was evident during the Thursday morning rush hour, when few cars could be seen on the typically traffic-clogged streets. Garbage was already piling up on the deserted sidewalks.
The country’s largest union, known by its acronym CGT, said it was organizing the strike alongside other labor unions “in defense of democracy, labor rights and a living wage.”
Argentina’s powerful unions, backed by Argentina’s left-wing Peronist parties that have dominated national politics for decades, have led the pushback against Milei’s policies on the streets and in the courts in recent months.
“We are facing a government that promotes the elimination of labor and social rights,” the unions said, trying to present Thursday’s strike as an explosion of public outrage over Milei’s free market policies that have disproportionately affected the middle classes. and poor.
The government downplayed the disruption as a cynical ploy by its left-wing political opponents.
“They want to keep Argentina on a path of servitude,” presidential spokesman Manual Adorni said of the union leaders, accusing them of “extorting Argentines to try to return to power.”
Milei posted a photo on Instagram on Thursday holding a soccer jersey emblazoned with the words “I DON’T STOP” in bold letters.
The escalation comes a week after Milei scored his first legislative victory, pushing the central omnibus bill of his economic reform through the lower house of Congress after being forced to withdraw a more radical version earlier this year. . The state reform bill and proposed tax packages are now being debated in the opposition-dominated Senate.
Thursday’s action marked the second national strike since Milei came to power last December, cutting spending, laying off government workers and freezing all public works projects in a bid to rescue Argentina from its worst financial crisis in two decades. It has also devalued the local currency, stabilizing the peso but also causing prices to skyrocket. Argentina’s annual inflation rate is now approaching 300%, considered the highest in the world, surpassing even crisis-stricken Lebanon.
For weeks, raucous demonstrations gripped Buenos Aires, the country’s capital, in stark contrast to the silence that prevailed in the streets on Thursday.
Argentina’s main airport warned travelers about disruptions and to check in with their airlines as more than 100 departing flights and 100 arriving flights were canceled as of 5am. The country’s flagship airline, Aerolíneas, announced that it had canceled about 200 domestic and regional flights and rescheduled more than a dozen international flights.
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