Under President Milei, the worst economic crisis in decades puts Argentine ingenuity to the test

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — In the crush of anti-government protests paralyzing downtown Buenos Aires in the last months, some Argentines saw a traffic-induced headache. Others saw a reaction to President Javier Milei's brutal austerity measures.

Alejandra, a street vendor, saw people with nowhere to urinate.

Plazas provided no privacy and cafes insisted on pricey purchases to use the toilet. With little more than a tent and a bucket, Alejandra started a small business that has surged alongside Argentina’s angry rallies and sky-high inflation rate. She charges whatever people are willing to pay.

“I haven't had a job for a year, it's now my sole income,” said Alejandra, who declined to give her last name for fear of reprisals from neighbors. Every four or five patrons, she puts on gloves and empties her bucket into the trash.

The political establishment’s failure to fix decades of crisis in Argentina explains the tide of popular rage that vaulted the irascible Javier Milei, a self-declared “anarcho-capitalist," to the presidency.

But it also explains the emergence of a unique society that runs on grit, ingenuity and opportunism — perhaps now more than ever as Argentina undergoes its worst economic crisis since its catastrophic foreign-debt default of 2001.

“It's the famous resilience of Argentines," said Gustavo González, a sociologist at University of Buenos Aires. “It's the result of more than three generations that have grappled with adverse circumstances, great uncertainty and abrupt changes.”

The libertarian leader warned that things would get worse before they got better.

To reverse the decades of reckless spending that brought Argentina infamy for defaulting on its debts, Milei scrapped hundreds of price controls. He slashed subsidies for electricity, fuel and transportation, causing prices to skyrocket in a country that already had one of the world's highest inflation rates.

He laid off over 70,000 public sector workers, cut pensions by 30% and froze infrastructure projects, pushing the country deeper into recession. Supermarket sales fell 10% last month. The International Monetary Fund lowered its 2024 growth outlook for Argentina, projecting a 3.5% contraction.

Poverty now afflicts a staggering 57% of Argentina’s 47 million people, and annual inflation surpasses 270% — a level unseen in a generation.

“Argentina is at a turning point,” Milei said in his Independence Day speech on July 9. “Breaking points in the history of a nation are not moments of peace and tranquility but moments of difficulty and conflict.”

Well-heeled Argentines have responded by stashing stacks of $100 bills in safe-deposit boxes and resorting to cryptocurrency to avoid their country's chronically depreciating pesos.

Middle-class families — whose energy bills shot up last month by 155% — have pared down comforts they once took for granted: No more eating out. No more travel. No more private school. Public hospitals say they're overwhelmed.

In a country where barbecued beef, or asado, is not only a national dish but a social ritual, meat consumption has dropped to the lowest level ever recorded, according to the Rosario Board of Trade.

The crisis has hit the poor hardest.

“They cannot hedge," said Eduardo Levy Yeyati, an economist at Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires. “They cannot save, they cannot travel. They are stuck here and are most affected by inflation and the fiscal adjustment.”

In the last five months, the official unemployment rate jumped two points to 7.7%, a figure that appears far lower than it really is, experts say, because Argentina's underground economy accounts for some half of its gross domestic product.

Rising joblessness and poverty have forced even more Argentines into the informal workforce. “Those who cannot find a job must invent one,” said Eduardo Donza, a poverty researcher at the Catholic University of Argentina.

For 34-year-old Armando Fernández, a broom has become a tool of survival.

Last month Fernández trekked hundreds of kilometers south by foot from his impoverished hometown in Santa Fe province, seeking work in Buenos Aires. Now he sweeps the capital’s sidewalks for whatever pesos that shop owners toss his way.

As Milei takes his chainsaw to the state’s anti-poverty programs, the poorest Argentines don’t have the coping mechanisms they once did.

“Politicians talk a lot but do nothing," Fernández said, scarfing down chicken stew provided by Solidarity Network, a charity born out of Argentina's successive crises. “I survive thanks to these soup kitchens, these people who offer me a bit of food.”

Seven days a week at nightfall, hundreds of people line up for free meals in the capital’s downtown square outside the presidential palace, which Solidarity Network turns into an open-air dining hall.

“We are serving more and more people every night,” said 31-year-old volunteer Pilar Cristiansen. “There are more and more people who cannot afford to buy food."

In line on a recent evening were homeless men like Fernández, but also newcomers — a chef whose work had dried up, a bank employee who was recently laid off, an electrician whose salary had lost the bulk of its value.

Argentina's downward spiral has long been visible in the southern suburbs ringing Buenos Aires. Streets are unpaved. Sewer lines don't reach. The walls of Noelia López's home are covered in haphazard patches of concrete.

From an attic spangled with laundry lines, López and her 21-year-old son Patricio run the only laundromat in their urban slum. By dawn their floor is shaking with the rumble of washing machines as they sort coats and quilts for some dozen neighbors a day.

What started as an impromptu income boost during the pandemic has become their livelihood.

“There is no greater thing than being able to recognize that this country is just like this,” López’s said of Argentina's volatility. “Now we have to bite the bullet once again.”

Growing up destitute as the daughter of Paraguayan immigrants in Buenos Aires, Maybel Delvalle was determined that her own children avoid the same fate.

She soon found herself a single mom with two hungry toddlers and realized that selling empanadas wouldn’t cover her bills.

Today the 25-year-old is a successful content creator on the platform OnlyFans, where she sells sexual fantasies to subscribers around the world and promotes her bootstraps story to legions of like-minded women. Her monthly income of $6,000 would be unthinkable for any Argentine doctor, lawyer or professor.

The work wasn't easy. Few had heard of the platform in 2020 when Delvalle stumbled across it. She had to teach herself how to stay anonymous and safe while posting explicit content, convert her dollar income to pesos at a favorable exchange rate and speak enough English to act as a "virtual girlfriend” to U.S.-based subscribers.

Once she got her windfall, she became Argentina's premier OnlyFans teacher. Delvalle is scrambling to keep pace with demand for her classes. “It’s been amazing,” she said of the past seven months since Milei took office.

Some 5,000 female students, 4,000 of them from Argentina, have enrolled in her trainings as they try to claw their way out of their country’s deepening poverty.

“There won't be a miracle to get us through this," she said. “You have to trust yourself more than anybody else."