Memoir Politics

An Argentine Dilemma

I love the New Yorker magazine. It always makes me think. Today I read an article in the most recent edition about President Javier Milei of Argentina. It caught my attention for a number of reasons. To begin with, I spent a lot of time in Argentina in the 1980s trying hard to get back about $500 million that they owed my bank. That was during the presidency of Raul Alfonsin, who had followed a string of generals (7 to be exact over 7 years) who were part of the military Junta that threw Isabel Peron out of office after they could no longer tolerate her union-organizing populist regime started by her deceased husband Juan. It should be noted that Argentina had had only three years of governance since the prior Junta had ruled the country for a first military round of 7 years. We all now that Trump 2.0 is #47, which spans 235 years of American history (average presidential term 5.15 years). That compares to Argentina where they have had 113 leaders over 214 years (1.89 year average term). What makes matters so much different still is that all 47 U.S. presidents have been in ostensibly the same definitional job where Argentina has had 10 different forms of governance over that time ranging from quasi colonial rule to true democracy to military dictatorship and various titles to go with the respective leadership roles.

I am also interested in updating myself on the Argentina of today since we are going there in March on our Patagonian cruise and I thought my understanding of the country needs some updating. It is said that Argentina has been the land of the future for over 200 years. That statement is not coincidentally ironic in construct. It is the way people suggest that Argentina continuously fumbles its opportunities. I lived for three years on Staten Island and that too suffered a similar fate in that it is said that Staten Island never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. To put this in perspective, I was knocking around Buenos Aires 40 years ago and from what I read in that New Yorker article, the place is at least as screwed up now as it was then. I used to say that the big difference between Argentina and Chile was that Chileans realized that based on their location on the Pacific side of the South American continent and the degree of difficulty of navigating around Cape Horn, they had to make Chile their permanent and forever home and they invested in it accordingly. Argentina was like an outpost of Europe and it was relatively easy to jump on a ship to go back to England or Spain to both spend time and invest their accumulated wealth being extracted from the natural riches of the country. I always used to feel like Argentina to wealthy Argentines was like a summer house. Their real home was in Europe but they enjoyed the pleasantries of the Pampas for their summer vacations. The funny thing to me is that the wealthy of Argentina were as arrogant and self-important as the bluest of the blue-bloods anywhere in the world. They cared more about their pedigrees, their school ties and their station in global life than they cared about their country. I never got that feeling in Chile or really anywhere else in Latin America.

Javier Milei is called the Madman and the Wig by some Argentines and one look at his picture and you can understand both names. He has a rather dramatic look about him that seems to match the image he wants to project as a quasi-anarchist with a headful of random hair that combines with his dour and serious look that makes him look ever so much like Heath Ledger’s Joker. The strangest part of persona is that Milei is a serious economist who lives and dies based on economic data. Apparently he likes working in the dark and that adds to the mystic. The last time I was in Buenos Aires was when Carlos Menem was President and I had the occasion to meet and spend time with him at the Casa Rosada (the Argentine equivalent to the White House). The two things I remember the most about him were that he was channeling Elvis with his huge, bushy sideburns and that his taste in art ran to a black velvet portrait of himself that looked even more like Elvis. But Menem did not seem serious to me whereas Milei seems as serious as a heart attack. His stated desire to dismantle as much of the state as he can both sounds strangely familiar to our DOGE efforts afoot here and seems quite serious.

Milei’s goth-like behavior is reinforced by his choice of pets. He has a stable of Bull mastiff that all bear the names of favorite economists and are all cloned from his prior mastiff, whose name was Conan the Barbarian. You can’t make this shit up. It is not surprising that the electorate considers him unbalanced, which used to be a disqualified for leadership, but now seems like an added plus to the resume of a national leader. Milei has embraced ways to bond with both Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Musk is supposedly quite keep on Milei’s “chainsaw” euphemism for cutting deep state excess and he is VERY keen on investing in Argentina, especially its lithium-rich mining sector. When I hear all of this I immediately think of the excessive and flamboyant ways of Robert Maxwell who pledged to invest heavily in Argentina in 1990 when I accompanied him there for a three-week buying expedition. Maxwell was a total showman and watching him and Menem jockeying for position in front of the camera (Maxwell had the edge since it was his cameraman) makes me think that Milei and Musk or Trump would be the same sort of publicity extravaganza. What I also remember was all the hard legwork that we did both before and after the photo sessions to make sure that there was a sound basis for anything that we seriously considered acquiring from the long line of Argentinian entrepreneurs that came calling with the next great salvation of mankind. I think at the end of the day, Maxwell made exactly zero real investments in Argentina because investing in the land of the future is never quite as easy as it is made to sound.

This has all made me think about the continuum between leftist and rightist political policies. Like Trump, Milei seems drawn to the right, but he still promotes the populist salvation of a new Argentina that can be made great again. The problem with that MAGA (Make Argentina Great Again) slogan is that you have to go back over a hundred years to when you could even claim that Argentina had a real shot at greatness and the fact that it never actually attained it. Maybe the slogan should read Make Argentina As Great As We Have Always Known It Could Be (MAGAWHAKICB). Milei says that he is the second most important politician in the world after Trump. It’s scary to think that Trump’s position is indeed that of the current king of the hill, but it is silly to think that Milei is even in the running for #2. He has been in office for over a year now and has yet to get a lot of dismantling done, much less any rebuilding. In some ways, Milei seems to be the perfect MAGA-era leader for Argentina…he will keep Argentina in its rightfully earned spot as the land of the future for the last one hundred and fifty years.

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