Argentina’s Milei wants China out, America in
- Chinese infrastructure builders are leaving and US spies, soldiers and corporate America are returning with the new government in Buenos Aires
In just 100 days, his government has banned most protests, cancelled a ministry for women and a national institute against discrimination, and shut down – by deploying heavily armed police – a state news agency, which it accused of “political bias”.
If all these things had happened in Hong Kong, you would have known all about it in 24/7 coverage from Washington and its faithful media servants in the Anglo-American press, just as you have been bombarded with heavily editorialised “news” about Hong Kong’s new security law. I really wonder how many of their readers or constituencies actually care about Article 23.
But all those not-very-nice things have been carried out by right-wing Argentine President Javier Milei, who is the new darling of Washington and the International Monetary Fund. So, nothing to see here, move on, please.
Of course, Milei really needs to ban protests. Poverty levels skyrocketed to 57.4 per cent of Argentina’s 46 million people in January, the highest in 20 years, according to a study by the Catholic University of Argentina. Child poverty could soon reach 70 per cent.
While his austerity programmes have won praise from the IMF, as they tend to do, they are making life worse for already hard-hit Argentines. No wonder the people are angry and want to hit the streets. Not by accident, rules on police deploying firearms have been relaxed.
Argentina’s Javier Milei makes up with Pope Francis over pastries, biscuits
But that’s all OK with Washington, and that’s why you don’t read or hear much about them in the mainstream news, not unless you really dig or know Spanish. Instead, the mainstream press seems mostly interested in Milei’s eccentricities such as his hairdo and his highly praised economic “reforms”.
Argentina and the terror
But this is all a very familiar story, for those who know something about America’s dark history across Latin America.
Milei has been more than eager to jump back into bed with the United States after he won the election from the previous China-friendly left-of-centre government.
As many as 30,000 were killed during the military junta’s “dirty war” against its own people, with Washington’s support. The coup “brought to power the bloodiest of these regimes [in South America] …” according to Vincent Bevins’ 2020 book, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. US corporations including Ford Motor Company collaborated in the disappearance of union workers, he said.
In 2018, an Argentine court convicted two former Ford executives and sentenced them to prison for helping the military dictators kidnap and torture 24 workers in the 1970s, The New York Times has reported. Ford Argentina said in a statement it was not part of the case and had participated fully with prosecutors, Reuters reported at the time.
Yale University historian Greg Grandin elaborates on the complicity.
“In Argentina in the 1970s, the Buenos Aires Ford Motor Company plant both served as a detention centre and lent out their signature Ford Falcon for death squads to use …” he wrote in Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic.
“In those days before death squads started using generic paramilitary black SUVs, victims [were] snatched off street corners and stuffed into the trucks of Falcons.”
Ford Motor was not alone. Corporate America was neck-deep in what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman called “the Latin America horror chamber”, in The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism.
Addressing a group of New York bankers in 1977, David Rockefeller, a lifelong patron of Henry Kissinger – who was an enthusiast of the infamous Operation Condor – waxed lyrical about the military junta.
Why a speech by Argentina’s Javier Milei strikes a chord in China
“I have the impression that finally Argentina has a regime which understands the private enterprise system … Not since the second world war has Argentina been presented with a combination of advantageous circumstances as it has now.”
As Chomsky and Herman wrote, “The Argentine catastrophe mirrors the recent history of Brazil, Chile and Uruguay.”
All these countries, among others, were deeply involved in Operation Condor. “The region’s dictators, again with help from the CIA, began to harmonise their activities under the rubric of what became known as Operation Condor,” Grandin wrote in Empire’s Workshop.
“Condor, operating out of Santiago, Chile, entailed coordinating the work of the national intelligence agencies of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru – agencies whose capacity for repression had already been greatly enhanced by Washington … – on a continental scale, allowing the coordinated targeting of dissidents throughout the Americas and beyond.
“The United States continued to provide key support to the various national intelligence agencies that made up Condor, as well as to Condor itself.”
So, if you wonder why many Argentines and their local news media found the timing of Burns’ visit highly inappropriate and offensive, wonder no more.
China out, America in, again
Milei has snubbed Brics’ invitation to join, and Beijing suspended a US$6.5 billion currency swap agreement with Argentina in December.
He may not want the Chinese completely out of his country but he certainly wants America back in. He has already been forcing out Chinese builders and inviting back US or US-approved weapon dealers, the US army and spies, and Wall Street.
That must have been music to officials such as Burns, Blinken and Richardson. Note the classic American trinity of state, intelligence and the military. Burns reportedly told his hosts, Milei’s Chief of Staff, Nicolás Posse, Security Minister Patricia Bullrich, and Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI) chief, Silvestre Sívori: “We have a short-term problem in the form of Russia, but a bigger long-term problem in the form of China.”
At least two-dozen used F-16 fighter jets are on their way to Milei. The US Army Corps of Engineers will be stationed along the Argentine sections of the Paraná river, the country’s most important trade and transport waterway.
It looks like the military engineers are the vanguard in squeezing out the Chinese who already have extensive interests along this strategic passageway.
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According to Corbishley, “Chinese companies control two of the major ports along the river … Also, a Chinese company, Shanghai Dredging Company, part of the CCCC conglomerate [China Communications Construction Co], had expressed an interest in managing the waterway.”
The contract of one of the river’s managers, the Belgian company Jan de Nul, expired last year.
On the banks of the Paraná river in Atucha, Corbishley wrote, a joint project with the Chinese to build Argentina’s fourth nuclear power plant, “is as good as dead and buried”, as is the Chinese-led construction of two dams on the Santa Cruz river, part of a huge hydroelectric project – all due to pressure from Washington.
Meanwhile, the fate of a satellite-tracking station and an observatory that are supposed to be part of China’s space programme in the Patagonia region is hanging by a thread. Washington has claimed the space stations could be used for spying and electronic surveillance, since it’s partly run by the People’s Liberation Army, which of course also runs China’s space programme.
The Chinese are clearly losing patience with Buenos Aires and may well be on their way out. But with Milei in charge, his American friends are rubbing their hands with glee.
