All this may sound familiar. The same neoliberal recipe was applied in the 1990s under Menem, contributing to the pile-up of economic woes that ended in crisis in 2001-02. But this time the surge of austerity and privatisation is likely to have a much more authoritarian cast. It’s telling that the security services are the one part of the state Milei has promised to expand. His coalition includes the ultra-conservative Fuerza Republicana, originally a vehicle for a former general who led vicious counterinsurgency operations in Tucumán province in the late 1970s. Milei’s vice president, Victoria Villarruel, is the daughter of a soldier who served in Tucumán and the Falklands/Malvinas, while her uncle was stationed at a clandestine detention centre run by the junta that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983. According to human rights groups and organisations representing victims’ families, the military killed or disappeared as many as thirty thousand people during the so-called Dirty War. Villarruel made her name by questioning the country’s hard-won reckoning with state violence, calling instead for a ‘complete memory’ of the dictatorship – meaning that blame should be shifted away from the military and back to the left-wing movements they repressed. Her presence on the Milei ticket points to another reason for the generational differences in voting patterns. For younger voters, the dictatorship is ancient history. But those old enough to remember it take very seriously the injunction of the 1984 truth commission’s report, ‘Nunca Más’ – Never Again.
The pattern of centre-right parties aligning with an insurgent far right won’t be news to residents of Brazil, the US, Italy, or indeed the UK. In that sense, recent events in Argentina conform to an ugly existing trend, in which the multiplying crises of liberal democracy produce political breaks to the right and attempts to impose ever harsher versions of the same economic medicine. Argentina’s centre right are seemingly betting that they can use Milei to further their own ends, but this may prove a catastrophically irresponsible wager. As Latin America’s experiences of dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s show, when the centre right and right converge the latter tends to drag the former along.
