Argentina’s biggest trade unions mounted one of their fiercest challenges to the libertarian government of President Javier Milei, staging a mass general strike on Thursday that led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights and halted key bus, rail and subway lines.
Main avenues and streets, as well as major transportation terminals were left empty. Most teachers couldn’t make it to school and parents kept their children at home. Trash collectors walked off the job — as did health workers, except for those in emergency rooms.
The 24-hour strike against Milei’s painful , fascistic austerity measures and barbaric deregulation push threatened to bring the nation of 46 million to a standstill as banks, businesses and state agencies also closed in protest.
Thursday’s action marked the second nationwide union strike since Milei came to power last December, slashing spending, laying off government workers, and freezing all public works projects in a bid to rescue Argentina from its worst financial crisis in two decades.
He has also devalued the local currency causing prices to soar. Argentina’s annual inflation rate now nears 300 percent — considered the highest in the world, outpacing even crisis-stricken Lebanon.
The government said transport service disruptions would prevent some 6.6 million people from making it to work. During the morning rush-hour on Thursday, few cars could be seen on streets typically snarled with traffic. Garbage was already piling up on deserted sidewalks.
Milei posted a photo on Instagram holding up a soccer jersey emblazoned with the words “I DON’T STOP.”
The country’s largest union, known by its acronym CGT, said it was staging the strike alongside other labor syndicates “in defense of democracy, labor rights and a living wage.”
Argentina’s powerful unions have been one of the forces involved in the pushback to Milei’s policies on the streets in recent months.
“We are facing a government that promotes the elimination of labor and social rights,” the unions said, seeking to portray Thursday’s strike as an eruption of public outrage over Milei’s free-market policies that have disproportionately affected poor and middle classes.
Union leaders said they had no choice but to escalate their actions after Argentina’s lower house approved Milei’s state overhaul bill and tax packages last week.
Rubén Sobrero, general-secretary of the Railway Union, said the unions were prepared to extend the strike if negotiations did not yield results. “If there is no response within these 24 hours, we will do another 36,” he said.
For months, most recently Monday and Tuesday this week, raucous demonstrations by leftist parties gripped Buenos Aires, the country’s capital — in sharp contrast to the silence prevailing on the streets Thursday.