90 days of Javier Milei’s Argentina: even soup kitchens are on the brink
At six in the morning, three cooks arrive at the soup kitchen with food from their own homes. Today they could muster only five onions and one pepper. They look down at the pot of stew and sigh.
“Normally we have enough ingredients to fill two pots, but today we only have enough for one,” Carmen Gutiérrez says. “We will have to give people a half portion.”
Gutiérrez, 70, founded the first soup kitchen in Barrio Fátima, a slum in Buenos Aires, in the Nineties. Today, she fears this comedor comunitario will not survive after the removal of government support — which previously accounted for 45 per cent of donations — as part of the new president’s radical programme to fix the economy.
“There are many, many more people coming now — people from all over, from different barrios — because so many of the other soup kitchens have already closed,” Gutiérrez says. “We feed 370 people four days a week, but have a waiting list of 180. They come and stand outside and we have to tell them there is no food left.”
Argentina has been in economic crisis for decades and in November elected as president the libertarian Javier Milei, who campaigned on promises to fix the country’s finances. In his inaugural address, the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” told the nation that to fix its ailing economy, “there is no alternative to shock therapy”.
He wasted no time. In the first 90 days of his presidency, Milei has devalued the peso by more than 50 per cent, cut tens of thousands of public-sector jobs and halved the number of government ministries to nine.
His austerity measures have hit the poor hardest: the cost of petrol has roughly doubled, food prices have risen by roughly half and state transport and energy subsidies have been ripped away. Public construction work has also been halted, pushing thousands of informal workers into unemployment. More devastating is that aid to 38,000 soup kitchens, which feed an estimated ten million people, has been frozen pending an audit.
