More stories

  • in

    Trump threatens to cut US aid to Argentina if Milei loses election

    Donald Trump has warned he could cut financial aid to Argentina if his ally Javier Milei loses crucial legislative elections later this month.“If he loses, we are not going to be generous with Argentina,” the US president said as Milei visited the White House to seek the Republican’s political and economic support. “I’m with this man because his philosophy is correct. And he may win and he may not win – I think he’s going to win. And if he wins we are staying with him, and if he doesn’t win we are gone.”Trump’s administration has already promised $20bn to prop up Argentina’s struggling economy but his backing has failed to calm the markets – or help Milei’s polling before midterms on 26 October.The results of the elections, in which Milei’s minority party is hoping to boost its seat tally, will dictate whether he can pass tough cost-cutting reforms or will face a legislative brick wall for the next two years of his term.Hailing Milei as a “great leader”, Trump said he would “fully endorse” his ideological ally in the elections. “He’s Maga all the way, it’s ‘Make Argentina Great Again,’” he added.Trump has, however, faced questions about how a big bailout for Argentina tallies with that same “America First” policy. Asked by reporters what the benefit to the United States was, Trump replied: “We are helping a great philosophy take over a great country. We want to see it succeed.”With Argentina struggling to stave off yet another financial crisis and Milei’s disapproval ratings rising, the country’s president has come to his rightwing ally Trump for help.Trump has repeatedly voiced political support for Milei, while backing it up with a promise of huge economic aid, but the markets remain spooked by Argentina. In recent weeks, the highly indebted country has had to spend more than $1bn to defend the peso, a strategy most economists believe is unsustainable.That prompted Milei’s allies in Washington to step in with a financial bailout. “Argentina faces a moment of acute illiquidity,” the US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said last week, announcing a $20bn deal.The announcement sparked a rally in Argentine bonds and stocks and helped ease pressure on the peso. It also marked a rare instance of direct US intervention in Latin American currency markets, underscoring Washington’s strategic interest in Milei’s success.In Argentina, there has been fevered speculation about what Trump might want from Milei in return for his support. Before Milei took power, Argentina – a major lithium producer – had been deepening ties with China.The Argentine president’s office said the leaders would discuss “multiple topics”.Trump also threatened trade penalties, including tariffs, against Spain on Tuesday, saying he was unhappy with its refusal to raise defence spending to 5% and calling the move disrespectful to Nato.“I’m very unhappy with Spain,” he told reporters at the White House. “They’re the only country that didn’t raise their number up to 5%. I was thinking of giving them trade punishment through tariffs because of what they did, and I think I may do that.”Nato leaders agreed in June to raise military spending to 5%, although the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, secured a last-minute exemption at the time, saying Spain would only spend up to 2.1%. Madrid has argued it compensates for the lower spending with strong troop contributions to Nato missions, including deployments in Latvia, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. More

  • in

    Why Trump is backing Argentina’s Thatcherite economics | Heather Stewart

    “We’re backing him 100%. We think he’s done a fantastic job. Like us, he inherited a mess.” Donald Trump gave his enthusiastic endorsement to Javier Milei’s radical economic experiment when the pair met in New York last week.The US has declared itself ready to offer more than rhetorical support to the chainsaw-wielding Argentinian president in the coming days, as Buenos Aires stands on the brink of a fresh financial crisis.The US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said the US was “ready to do what is needed”. He suggested the Federal Reserve could offer Buenos Aires a $20bn (£15bn) dollar swap line – a crucial crisis-fighting tool – or the US could even buy the country’s bonds directly.US administrations have rallied support for Argentinian governments in the past – Bill Clinton was a fan of Carlos Menem’s 1990s reforms, for example. But Trump’s readiness to wade in directly is the latest example of his determination to use economic tools for political ends: in this case, propping up an ideological ally.Milei swept into power two years ago, on a wave of frustration and discontent with the economic status quo.Like Trump and Boris Johnson, he eschewed the usual conventions of politics and promised to smash up the establishment and remake the state on behalf of the people.But while Milei’s political playbook may echo Trump’s, with its embrace of chaos and showbiz, his economic policies owe something to another radical with big hair – Margaret Thatcher, whom the Argentinian president has called “brilliant”.Like the Thatcher governments in the UK, Milei sees slaying the dragon of inflation as an overriding priority. The challenge in Argentina is on a completely different scale to 1980s Britain, however: the inflation rate peaked at more than 25% a month soon after Milei came to power.But aspects of his approach, including a systematic onslaught on trade union rights, public spending cuts and a wave of privatisations, have echoes of Thatcherism.Despite lacking a parliamentary power base, Milei has succeeded in cutting deep into pensions and public sector wages – and more than 48,000 public sector workers have lost their jobs.He travelled to CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, in the US, to pose on stage next to a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) was partly inspired by Milei’s aggressive style.Argentina’s tough policies have won plaudits from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which granted a new $20bn lifeline to Argentina in April.On stage at the IMF’s meetings in Washington that month, its managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, proudly pinned on to her green jacket a tiny silver chainsaw badge, handed to her by Argentina’s minister for deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger.But while Milei’s “shock therapy” may have met with approval in Washington – and indeed in financial markets – the Argentinian economist and campaigner Lucía Cirmi Obón highlights its human impact.“The macroeconomic changes implemented by Milei have not shown – nor do I believe they will show – any positive impact on people’s quality of life. In practice, what we are seeing is an economic recession,” she told the Guardian.“The main reasons are that real wages fell, and the opening of imports also dismantled a large part of national industry. On top of that, there were cuts to the number of people receiving a pension, support for childcare, for people with disabilities who used to receive pensions. All of the policies the population used to receive from the state have been reduced.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnemployment has risen by two percentage points, but she argues that there is also significant hidden unemployment – with former factory workers crowding into poorly paid gig-economy jobs such as Uber driving, for example. Household debt is rising, and because many of the occupations targeted by cuts are female-dominated, the gender pay gap has widened, undoing six years’ worth of progress.Obón adds that while Milei’s approach was meant to unleash the corporate sector, to open the way for surging economic growth, investment as a share of GDP has actually fallen.Meanwhile, determined to squash inflation, Milei has maintained the peso’s link to the dollar – a trigger for so many crises in Argentina over the years.For several decades, the peso has been pegged – within limits – to the greenback, which circulates within Argentina as an alternative currency, in which many citizens like to hold their savings, especially in times of trouble.Milei had advocated full dollarisation during the election campaign – a policy that would leave Argentina without the right to set its own interest rates. When he came to power and allies rejected that plan, he instead devalued the peso by more than half, willing to wear the resulting inflation in the hope of stimulating exports.But the currency has nevertheless come under continued selling pressure – exacerbated by the political uncertainty unleashed when Milei suffered a disastrous showing in local legislative elections in Buenos Aires province, which he had himself called a “life or death battle”.Since those local elections, and amid a mounting clamour of corruption claims against Milei’s powerful sister, Karina, the peso sell-off has accelerated. The central bank burned through more than $1bn of reserves in a week trying to prop up the currency, before Bessent announced Washington was ready to step in.As well as political fellow feeling, some experts suggest geopolitics may have been another motivation for Washington’s intervention, with China becoming increasingly influential in Latin America.The peso rallied and the markets calmed after Bessent’s comments, but as the costs of “shock therapy” bite and Milei looks to crucial midterm elections in October, the Argentinian public face a volatile period ahead. More

  • in

    Interpol Arrests 20 Over Network That Distributed Child Sex Abuse Material

    The international sweep included arrests in 12 countries across Europe and the Americas. The agency said there were also dozens of other suspects.Twenty people in Europe, the United States and South America have been arrested as part of an investigation into an international network that produced and distributed child sexual abuse material, Interpol said on Friday. The policing organization said the network was also thought to extend to Asia and the Pacific region.The arrests, which took place in 12 countries, were the result of a cross-border inquiry in which investigators tracked the illegal material online to people who viewed or downloaded it, according to Interpol.The sweep made public by Interpol on Friday included arrests in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Italy, Paraguay, Portugal, Spain and the United States. It also led investigators to 68 other suspects in 28 countries, including the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania, according to Interpol and the Spanish police.The investigation began last year in Spain, where officers from the national police force’s specialized cyberpatrols came across suspicious instant messaging groups, the Spanish police said in a statement on Friday. The police said the online groups had been set up exclusively to distribute images of child sexual exploitation.As the authorities in Spain became aware that the network behind the online messaging forums was international, they began to work with the Interpol, where investigators broadened the operation to South America, Interpol said.In the arrests announced on Friday, the police in Spain said they had detained seven people in five provinces, and seized cellphones, computers and storage devices. Investigators found that in some cases, those suspected of viewing or downloading the illegal images worked with children.In Seville in southern Spain, the police arrested a schoolteacher whom they accused of being in possession of exploitative images and belonging to several chat groups through which the illegal material was distributed.In Barcelona Province, the police arrested a health worker who treated children; the police said that he was suspected of paying minors in Eastern Europe for sexually explicit images.The police said that one man who was arrested in the town of El Masnou in Barcelona Province had downloaded a messaging app to watch the illegal material and later deleted the app to hide his activities from his family.In Latin America, officers arrested a teacher in Panama and 12 other people in countries across the region, Interpol said. More

  • in

    Boxes of Nazi Material Are Found After Decades in Basement of Argentina Court

    Thousands of documents in the boxes could result in new information about Nazi activity in Argentina in the early years of World War II.Workers clearing out the basement of Argentina’s Supreme Court made a startling discovery recently. They found boxes filled with swastika-stamped notebooks, propaganda material and other Nazi-era documents.The boxes had been stored there for more than eight decades, the court said, and were uncovered by accident because workers were going through archives for the creation of a Supreme Court Museum.Upon opening the boxes, they found “material intended to consolidate and propagate Adolf Hitler’s ideology in Argentina, during the height of World War II,” according to a statement from the court in Spanish.Last week, officials, researchers and members of the Argentine Jewish community held a ceremony to open more of the boxes. The court’s president, Horacio Rosatti, ordered a full survey of the material given its historical significance and “potentially crucial information it could contain to clarify events related to the Holocaust,” the court said in its statement on Monday.Jonathan Karszenbaum, the executive director of the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires, participated in the formal opening on Friday. “I was shocked because of the volume of this,” he said, adding that he had not seen the contents of all of the boxes.The court has determined some details about the origin of the boxes. It said that the material had arrived in Argentina from the German Embassy in Tokyo on June 20, 1941, on the Japanese ship Nan-a-Maru, when Argentina was officially neutral in World War II, and Japan was allied with Hitler’s Germany.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Want to beat authoritarianism? Look to Latin America | Greg Grandin

    Inspiration on how to beat back authoritarianism is in short supply, but those searching for hope in these dark times might consider Latin America.It’s not the first place that comes to mind when thinking about democracy, associated as it is with coups, death squads, dictatorships, inequality, drug violence and now a country, El Salvador, offering itself up to Donald Trump as an offshore prison colony for deportees.It is a bleak place in many ways, especially for the jobless and the poor who flee their home countries in search of a better life somewhere else, often in the United States. The bleakness, though, only highlights the paradox: for all its maladies, for all its rightwing dictators and leftwing caudillos, for all its failings when it comes to democratic institutions, the region’s democratic spirit is surprisingly vital.Other areas of the world emerged broken from the cold war, roiled by resource conflicts, religious fundamentalism and ethnic hatreds. Think of the bloody Balkans of the 1990s or 1994’s Rwandan genocide.Not Latin America, where, by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, most of its anti-communist dictatorships had given way to constitutional rule. With the jackboot off their necks, reformers went on the offensive, seeking to redeem not just democracy but social democracy.Today, in the United States at least, the concept of democracy is generally defined minimally, as comprising regularly held elections, a commitment to due process to protect individual rights, and institutional stability. But earlier, in the middle of the last century, a more robust vision that included economic rights prevailed – that indeed the second world war was fought not just against fascism but for social democracy. “Necessitous men are not free men,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt liked to say. Reporting from Europe in late 1945, William Shirer described a groundswell demand for social democracy, in an article headlined: Germany is finished, communists distrusted, majority wants socialism.Latin America joined in the demand, and by 1945 nearly every country understood citizenship as entailing both individual and social rights. Latin Americans broadened classical liberalism’s “right to life” to mean a right to a healthy life, which obligated the state to provide healthcare. “Democracy, political as well as social and economic,” wrote Hernán Santa Cruz, a childhood friend of Salvador Allende and a Chilean UN delegate who helped Eleanor Roosevelt draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “comprises, in my mind, an indivisible whole”.That whole was shattered to pieces by the death-squad terror of the cold war, much of it patronized by Washington, followed by the free-market neoliberal economics pushed on Latin America during that war.Yet once the repression abated and citizens were free to vote their preference, they began to elect social democrats as presidents, men and women who represented a variety of historical social movements: feminists, trade unionists, peasant organizers, Indigenous rights campaigners, heterodox economists, environmentalists and liberation theologians. Today, a large majority of Latin Americans live in countries governed by the center left. Despite the best efforts of Friedrich von Hayek and his libertarian followers in the region to convince them otherwise, most Latin Americans do not believe that welfare turns citizens into serfs.Pankaj Mishra, in his survey of the horrors inflicted on Palestinians, has written about the “profound rupture” in the “moral history of the world” since 1945. No region has done more to heal that rupture than Latin America.And no region has had as much experience beating back fascists, long after the second world war had ended, than Latin America. Rightwing authoritarians, gripped by the same obsessions that move Trump supporters in the United States, have some momentum, though they haven’t been able to escalate occasional electoral victories, including in Argentina and Ecuador, into a full-on continental kulturkampf.Center-left democrats hold the right at bay by putting forth an expansive social-democratic agenda, one flexible enough to include demands for sexual and racial equality. As the US rolls back abortion rights, momentum in Latin America moves in the other direction – Argentina, Mexico and Colombia either decriminalizing or legalizing abortion. Gay marriage and same-sex civil unions have been recognized in 11 countries.Spasms of ethnonationalist rage gripped much of the world the 1990s – Indonesia’s 1998 anti-Chinese rampage, for example. In contrast, Indigenous peoples in countries including Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and Guatemala burst into politics as the best bearers of the social democratic tradition, adding environmentalism and cultural rights to the standard menu of economic demands. Today, many countries have retreated behind an aggrieved nationalism. For the most part, Latin Americans have not. Their reaction to the depredations of corporate globalization is rarely expressed in xenophobic, antisemitic or conspiratorial tropes, as a struggle against “globalists”. Nationalism in Latin America has long been understood as a gateway to universalism.Frontline activists stand unbowed before police batons and paramilitary guns. In 2022, Latin America clocked the world’s highest murder rate of environmental activists. Unionists, students, journalists, and women’s and peasant rights activists are assassinated at a regular clip. Yet organizing continues. In Brazil during the four-year presidency of the Trump-like Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023), the Landless Workers’ Movement, already the largest social movement in the world, grew even larger.When it comes to interstate relations, Latin America is one of the most peaceful regions. There is no nuclear competition, thanks to one of the most successful arms control treaties in history, the 1967 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.In 1945, Latin American diplomats drew on their long history in opposing Washington’s interventionism to play a key role in founding the liberal multilateral order, the global system of governance now upended by Trump. Most importantly, the region’s leaders insisted that nations should be organized around the premise of cooperation, not competition, that diplomacy should be used to settle differences, and that war should be a last resort. Their post-cold war counterparts have loudly defended these principles, first against George W Bush during the war on terror, and more recently against Joe Biden and Trump, insisting that the art of diplomacy must be relearned. “Brazil has no enemies,” the country’s defense minister once said, notable considering that the Pentagon has marked out the entire globe as a battlefield.Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, among others, have criticized the return to power politics and balance-of-power diplomacy. If the past teaches anything, they say, it is that opening a belligerent multi-front balance of power – with the United States pushing against China, pushing against Russia, with all countries, everywhere, angling for dominance – will lead to more confrontation, more war. As with the United States’s shapeshifting, amorphous domestic culture war, there is no clear endgame to this new era of militarized economic competition, of war by proxy and privateer, which only increases the odds of conflict spinning out of control.One need not romanticize Latin America. To recognize the strength of the social democratic ideal in Latin America does not require one to celebrate all those who call themselves socialists, in Nicaragua and Venezuela, for example. And even those we might celebrate, such as Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum or Chile’s Gabriel Boric, preside over states loaded with significant amount of repressive power, often directed at some of their country’s most vulnerable, such as Mapuche activists in southern Chile.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut there is no other region of the world that so persistently continues to insist on taking the Enlightenment at its word, whose leftwing politicians and social movements win by advancing a program of universal humanism. Trump has transformed the United States government into a predator-state, a tormenter of citizens and non-citizens alike. Latin American social democrats – Lula in Brazil and Mexico’s Sheinbaum, Uruguay’s Yamandú Orsi, and Petro in Colombia, among others – do what they can to use state power to fulfill an obligation: the ideal that all people should live in dignity.The forcefulness in which Latin American leaders such as Lula and Sheinbaum defend social rights contrasts with the timidity of the Democratic party. Biden did pass legislation suggesting it was breaking with the old neoliberal order. But Biden’s team couldn’t find its voice, unable to link a reinvestment in national industry with a renewed commitment to social citizenship. Democrats are shrill in denouncing Trump’s extremism even as they are timid in offering an alternative.Confronted with a existential crisis that people feel in their bones, the Democratic party puts forth weak-tea fixes in an enervating technocratic jargon, its counselors saying the lesson of Kamala Harris’s loss is that the party has to think even smaller, has to shake off its activist constituencies and move to the center.A recent op-ed in the New York Times urged Democrats to lay out their own Project 2029, to counter the conservative thinktank Heritage Foundation’s influential Project 2025. What did the author of the op-ed believe should be in this new project? A call for national healthcare? No. Affordable housing? No. Paid vacations, universal childcare or an increase in the minimum wage? None of that. He suggested that the Democrats promise to streamline regulations and improve “the quality” of “customer-service interactions”.Woodrow Wilson imagined a world without war. FDR imagined a world without fear or want. Today’s would-be governing liberals in the United States imagine nothing. They treat the promise of a humane future – or of any future at all – like a weight from the past, hard to bear, easy to toss aside.Democrats in the United States can’t simply mimic social democrats in Latin America; they operate in vastly different political contexts. But Latin America is a useful mirror, reflecting the considerable distance Democrats in the US have drifted from New Deal values. They might want to read Roosevelt’s Faith of the Americas speech, where he said that the best way to defuse extremism was to use government action to ensure “a more abundant life to the peoples of the whole world”.Latin America social democrats today – and not the Democratic party in the United States – are the true heirs of FDR’s vision. They know that if democracy is to be something more than a heraldic device, it must confront entrenched power. Latin American reformers know that the way to beat today’s new fascists is the same as it was in the 1930s and 1940s: by welding liberalism to a forceful agenda of social rights, by promising, in a voice simple, clear and sure, to improve the material conditions of people’s lives.“People have to have hope again,” as Lula put it in his most recent successful run for re-election, “and a full belly, with morning coffee and lunch and dinner”.What’s giving me hope nowWhat gives me hope is that in a place like Latin America, where the forces of reaction are so fierce, social movements led by feminists, peasants, first peoples, and gay and trans activists continue to fight back against fierce repression with enormous courage. Political theorists like to measure “democracy” according to institutional stability and free elections, and by that standard, many places in Latin America come up short. But if we measure democracy by courage, by a tenacity to continue to fight for universal, humane values, for a more sustainable, more equal, more human world, then Latin America carries forward the democratic ideal.

    Greg Grandin, the C Vann Woodward professor of history at Yale, is the author of the recently published, America, América: A New History of the New World, from which parts of this essay were based. More

  • in

    Javier Milei, Trump’s ‘Favorite President,’ Has Few Deals to Offer — but Lots of Adoration

    Javier Milei of Argentina might not be that useful for the United States on economics or geopolitics — but he can help to fight the culture wars.The day after President Trump antagonized world leaders across the globe with his most sweeping set of tariffs yet, he was scheduled to fly to Florida and potentially see the one leader he has called his “favorite president.”That leader, President Javier Milei of Argentina, had flown overnight to receive an award on Thursday at a right-wing gala at Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Trump was scheduled to also be there late Thursday — Mr. Milei said Mr. Trump would receive an award, too — and Mr. Milei said he hoped the two would meet.It was Mr. Milei’s 10th trip to the United States in 15 months as president, and nearly every time, he has met Mr. Trump or Elon Musk.Mr. Trump has posited that he is reshuffling U.S. foreign policy strictly around what is good for the United States.So what can be puzzling about his elevation of Argentina to the front row of America’s allies — Mr. Milei and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy were the only world leaders onstage at Mr. Trump’s inauguration — is that the chronically distressed South American nation is not particularly important as an economic or geopolitical partner.Instead, through Mr. Milei, Argentina has offered Mr. Trump something else he appears to crave: adoration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More