Argentina: 100 people arrested, injured in protest that shakes Javier Milei’s chainsaw regime

The following is a March 14 report in lahaine.org. Translation: John Catalinotto.

It is nothing new that retired workers, who have been victims of the “adjustment” (a euphemism for pension cuts), are protesting. What was surprising was that football fans reacted to the repression suffered by their elders. But the biggest surprise was that in yesterday’s mobilization, March 12, a new social sector joined the protest.

Retirees, their families & unions protest Javier Milei’s brutal austerity. Buenos Aires, March 12, 2025.

And it wasn’t the well-publicized barras bravas [soccer clubs]. They were the poor relatives of those grandparents who receive the minimum wage and can’t afford to buy their medicines. They are the poor who can’t make ends meet and, although they are football fans, most can’t afford a ticket to go to the stadium.

Those who expected to see large contingents of our country’s most important soccer-fan clubs, which are known for their aggressive behavior (the famous barras bravas), could not find them. What was found were small groups of people of all ages who shared a team’s shirt and probably a family or a neighborhood. Those were the majority.

The rest were made up of some union delegations (we saw Atilra, Sipreba, Sutna, ATE, ATSA) and also a few Peronist groups. There were also the left-wing delegations, which, although not very numerous, occupied the centre of Plaza Lorea.

The common denominator of the demonstrators was a great deal of anger at the situation for the retired workers and also regarding their living conditions. When a rumor spread that a pensioner had been killed, tempers flared. It later emerged that a young man (who turned out to be the journalist Pablo Grillo) had been hit in the head by a gas grenade.

‘Milei, you’re garbage!’

There was a lot of anger and indignation, which is why the most chanted slogans were: “Que se vayan todos” (They should all go) and “Milei, basura, vos sos la dictadura” (Milei, you’re garbage, you’re the dictatorship). And moved by that anger they held out for a long time in Plaza Lorea despite the tear gas, the water cannons and the rubber bullets.

We saw the destruction of one of the patrol cars that tried to advance along Sáenz Peña Street and, stuck in traffic, advanced along the sidewalk and was stoned by different groups of demonstrators who were leaving the march.

Some of the already excited demonstrators made their way to the Plaza de Mayo and ended up expressing their anger at the Casa Rosada [Pink House, Argentina’s presidential residence]. As the protesters withdrew, the largest number of arrests were made. As they have done on other occasions, the police went on the hunt and took anyone who happened to be passing. By 9 p.m. yesterday, they had already arrested 100 people.

The images that are already circulating around the world today speak for themselves: Police officers can be seen hitting an elderly retiree, over 80 years old, with a bat on his head as he was simply protesting; the journalist Pablo Grillo is filmed being shot while trying to take a photo; and the media show how the Minister of Security, in statements to journalists, confuses this injured reporter with a detainee.

The images also show that the bulk of the crowd was made up of entire families who had come to accompany their grandparents. The opening titles of the television programs that reported on a confrontation between the police and the “barras bravas” (hooligan gangs) did not correspond to the images. There were no “La Doce” or “Borrachos del Tablón” (allegedly drunken football fans), just families taking refuge from tear gas and rubber bullets and local kids throwing stones at the police.

Towards the end of the day, the federal police on their motorbikes put on a show, trying to intimidate and show the media that the government has everything under control. That is far from reality. The fact that legislators from the ruling party’s own bench ended up fighting in the parliamentary chamber shows that they don’t even control their own members.

Opposition to Milei grows

But the biggest problem for the government is that there are more and more sectors of society that not only repudiate Milei, whom they describe as a fraud and a tyrant, they are no longer just protesting about the austerity measures or the repression. They have started to demand that the government resign. What’s important is that the popular condemnation of Milei and his Minister of Security [Patricia Bullrich] is spreading to other sectors, which until now had not participated in the protests.

And with the retired workers it is the same as with the schoolchildren — in every family there is at least one.

Judge Karina Andrade ordered the immediate release of the detainees, stating in the grounds for her decision that: “with regard to the reported arrests, a fundamental constitutional right is at stake, namely the right to protest, to demonstrate in a democracy and to freedom of expression, on a day like today when the most vulnerable sectors of our nation, such as the conventionally protected elderly, are taking action, it is especially incumbent on the judiciary to respond to this.”

This resolution confirms that a sector of the judiciary has already taken note of the blatant arbitrariness of this government and does not want to be tied to it.

Milei and his cronies lost a great battle for consensus on March 12. But the biggest challenge for the Milei regime is that those who were in the square have begun to lose their fear of his rule.