Thousands of people demonstrate in front of the Argentine Congress this Wednesday in rejection of President Javier Milei’s vetoes against laws that seek to remedy the financial suffocation of public universities and the largest pediatric hospital in the country.
The vetoed laws planned to update the university budget according to inflation from 2023 and improve the salaries of teachers and auxiliary staff. They also declared a health emergency that involved allocating funds especially for Garrahan, the largest pediatric hospital in the country. The health and education sectors have been two of the main ones affected by the ultraliberal president’s chainsaw.
The university presidents considered in a joint statement that this program “ratifies and aggravates the adjustment” because it does not plan to compensate for lost income. In the university salary debate, the Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo, attacked the rector of the University of Buenos Aires, ensuring that he earned “six times more than me.” Emiliano Yacobitti assured that “what he says is false” and published his August payrolls on social networks, in an exchange reported by the Clarín newspaper.
Debate in Congress
With signs such as “no to the veto” and “save the Garrahan”, thousands of students, teachers, doctors and unions demand that the deputies vote against the presidential measures. “Education and health are at risk, it is essential that we have access to the quality education that Argentina offers us. We cannot allow what we achieved with so much struggle throughout history to be taken away from us,” Zoe Gómez, 23, told AFP.
Congress, where the ruling party does not have a majority, has the possibility of reversing both vetoes, something that had an unusual precedent at the beginning of the month with the presidential veto of the law that provided more funds for disabled people. To this end, the Chamber of Deputies began a debate this Wednesday. The Lower House has already rejected the veto by 181 votes in favor of the pediatric health law, 60 against and one abstention. And he also rejected the veto by 174 votes in favor of the university financing law, 67 against and two abstentions. Both vetoes must now be debated in the Senate, where the laws, if they also obtain at least two-thirds of the votes, will come into force.
On Monday, Milei presented a 2026 budget project that includes greater allocations for health and education, among other items, but protesters reject it as insufficient.
Economic turmoil
The protests come at a time when the economy is slowing and the dollar is rising. Argentina’s gross domestic product (GDP) registered a decrease of 0.1% in the second quarter of the year compared to the previous quarter and increased 6.3% in year-on-year terms, official sources reported this Wednesday.
Furthermore, the dollar rose to a level that enables the Central Bank to intervene in the market to try to lower the price of the US currency. The price of the dollar in the state-owned Banco Nación rose 5 pesos this Wednesday, to a record of 1,485 pesos for sale to the public. In the wholesale market, it rose to 1,474.50 pesos per unit, and thus exceeded the value of 1,474.35 pesos that enables the Central Bank to sell dollars in that market to try to contain demand. The monetary authority has not yet confirmed whether it would intervene. Source: news
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