(20 Feb 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Buenos Aires, Argentina – 19 February 2025
1. Woman yells at police officers on motorbikes, UPSOUND (Spanish), "These are retirees; what are you doing with those guns? Cowards, cowards!"
2. Police pushing protesters out of the street
3. Various of riot police in front of Congress
4. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Alberto Schocron, 78, retired doctor:
"Many people are dying (due to the low pensions), and since I am a doctor, I tell you: this (economic) plan is going to kill more people than the pandemic itself, and this comes from someone who has worked in pandemics since the 1980s."
5. Alberto Schocron, 78, holds a sign that reads (Spanish) "Don’t kill us with clubs nor with hunger."
6. Various of police, protesters singing UPSOUND (Spanish) "How awful must be to make a living beating up retirees."
7. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Alicia Torroija, 78, retired psychologist:
"Today, with the cryptocurrency and all this story, they came to leave the earth scorched, to steal everything from us, to rob us all, and that is what they are doing, stealing everything and starving us all."
8. A doctor protesting holds a sign that reads (Spanish), "With the money of the crypto scam, we could buy medicine for the retirees. Milei and their band of scammers."
9. Doctors protesting chant UPSOUND (Spanish) "Police out, police out."
STORYLINE:
Protesters clashed with police as they tried to march around the Argentine Congress to demand higher pensions and against austerity measures implemented by Argentina’s President Javier Milei.
After taking power a year ago, Milei implemented a series of austerity measures to address the country’s economic woes. These included slashing energy and transportation subsidies, laying off tens of thousands of government workers, freezing public infrastructure projects,, and imposing wage and pension freezes below inflation.
Protesters, including pensioners, members, and supporters of opposition parties, have held small marches every Wednesday to protest their scant pensions and reduced health plans.
Protesters reacted to the ongoing scandal affecting Milei’s government after he promoted in X a cyber currency named $LIBRA last week that collapsed, causing millions of dollars in losses to its brief investors, according to financial site Dexscreener.
The coin, developed by KIP Protocol and Hayden Davis, could be obtained by accessing a link that directed users to a website called vivalalibertadproject.com, referring to the well-known phrase with which Milei closes speeches and messages on his social media.
In a statement on Saturday, the President’s Office said that Milei was not involved in any stage of the cryptocurrency’s development and decided to remove the post to avoid speculation and limit further exposure following the public reaction to the project’s launch.
Argentina’s retirees are perhaps the most potent symbol of the strife inflicted by Milei’s fiscal shock.
Some of the government’s biggest savings came from lowering the real value of pensions. The average minimum monthly pension is just $300, while the poverty line for a family of four is $1,000.
Signs have emerged that Argentina’s bizarre and long-mismanaged economy is starting to look more normal.
Monthly inflation has plummeted, bonds have rallied, and the closely watched gap between the black market dollar and the official rate has shrunk.
AP video shot by Victor R. Caivano and Javier Brat
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