As Santiago Adano walked off stage, his friends embraced him in relief as much as congratulations. On June 12th, the musician was one of thirty-five peaceful protestors who were imprisoned for demonstrating against a controversial senate bill known as the Ley Bases. While thirty-three of those initially arrested have been released, two remain in federal prison. Thirty-one still face charges ranging from property damage to attacking Argentina’s constitutional order. On Friday, Santiago and his former band, Julio y Agosto (July and August), performed at a festival in front of the presidential palace to demand the the last two protestors’ release.
The Ley Bases, which has since been approved by both chambers of Congress, is a law package that includes privatizations, reduced worker protections, and generous investment terms for big ($200 million+) foreign investments. Economic critics note a lack of mechanisms for keeping investments in Argentina and redistributing its benefits to workers, while climate activists underscore its debilitation of environmental regulations. On the day of the arrests, protestors had gathered in the Congressional plaza, where the senate was inside debating the bill. The demonstration escalated through the afternoon, with some protestors throwing stones at police, burning dumpsters, and lighting a car on fire.
After a large repressive operation, including water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets, police arrested thirty-five protestors. President Javier Milei congratulated the security forces for “excellent repression of the terrorist groups” who “attempted a coup d’etat.” There wasn’t a clear connection between the instigators of violence and those arrested, however: among those detained were a food cart salesman and bystanders watching the protest from the perimeter.
At Friday’s festival, a group of the released protestors read a testimony that included a description of their treatment: “Some of us were held in the back of a police truck for seventeen hours,” the document read. “At the police station, they stripped us one by one… others were taken to maximum-security prisons, where the penitentiary service agents greeted them in balaclavas and pepper sprayed them in the face.”
The festival brought together bands, political parties, and neighborhood associations in solidarity with those who they say were victims of the governments’ criminalization of the right to protest. As case in point, police tried to prevent organizers from setting up the stage when they arrived, even though the city government had approved the festival in advance. Eventually, the police conceded and the stage went up. It was a particularly special evening for Julio y Agosto, who hadn’t played together in three years.
“In reality, we’re playing to be together with Santi,” said guitarist Miguel Canvari. “It’s for friendship and love for the band, and for him. No more than that, because we [the band] aren’t together right now.”
The Right to Protest
The June 12th arrests escalated what organizers are calling a sweeping attack on the right to protest. During the first weeks of president Milei’s government, security minister Patricia Bullrich passed a protocol that declares blocking traffic in assembly a “flagrant crime” and authorizes the use of force against any such manifestation. The security protocol, which dictates how police respond to protests, was mobilized for particularly brutal operations against peaceful demonstrators demanding food for community kitchens (April 10th) and protesting the defunding of Argentina’s National Institute for Film and Audiovisual Arts (March 14th). Significantly, the protocol does not require that police negotiate with protestors before resorting to violence.
In the document, Bullrich also cites concerns over increasing violence and property damage, though these were already punishable offenses prior to the protocol. The document doesn’t give the state any more leverage than it already had in dealing with riots and escalation; rather, it criminalizes the act of protesting itself, allowing police to disperse and press charges against peaceful demonstrators.
In January, the UN sent a document to Bullrich warning that the protocol violates international human rights treaties that Argentina has signed. One such treaty explicitly states that “interrupting vehicular or pedestrian traffic or everyday activities does not constitute an act of ‘violence.’”
The protocol directly contradicts this, declaring that the police force and Federal security will intervene against “any concentration of people or placement of obstacles that decrease the width of streets, routes, avenues, or railways… or impede persons’ entry to public spaces or businesses,” which are punishable offenses “even when [the protests] do not pose any risk.” The document is motivated by the increasing scale and frequency of road blockades, which have created “an unbearable situation for the people who suffer these illegal acts, which deteriorate their work and quality of life.” The protocol’s focus on commercial routes and its disregard for protests’ cause, size, and level of risk indicate that the government’s primary concern, championed by “unbearably” inconvenienced commuters, is the movement of capital.
Although the protocol is oriented around commerce and traffic, it does not follow that it represents workers’ interests. The prioritization of business interests over civil liberties and quality of life has been a major cause of social disaffection in the last twenty years, not to mention the heart of labor movements for at least the last two centuries. That’s because declines in working conditions have historically been precipitated by unregulated business, not people blocking the street. Contrary to threatening workers, cutting routes and disrupting the flow of capital are powerful nonviolent means for improving employees’ rights and protections. The criminalization of these actions does guarantee more freely moving capital, but whether it improves the conditions under which people work, as the protocol claims, is another question.
The Free Market
In the security protocol, peoples’ right to articulate their discontent through protest is subordinate to the right of other people to move goods from one place to another. This hierarchy of rights underpins Milei’s orthodox economics: just like rent control or import/export duties, the right to protest, insofar as it blocks the flow of goods, is a point-blank interference in the free market.
The Ley Bases is written on the assumption that maximizing commercial activity is always in workers’ interests, but the security protocol ensures steady profits even when that’s not the case. Some have raised concerns, for instance, that under the Ley Bases, “fracking and open-pit mining companies will have priority access to water over the local population” in the event of a shortage. Such a conflict is precisely where the social enforcement of an economic doctrine becomes indispensable, ensuring continued extraction over locals’ basic needs. This confrontation between capital flows and human rights demonstrates the interface between the government’s economic policy and social-repressive arm: no matter how much Milei treats protest as an infringement on independent markets, his numbers game ultimately depends on violently enforced forms of social organization.
The irony of Milei’s admiration of former president Trump and free-market policies developed at the University of Chicago is that the U.S.—much less Trump—has never itself followed those policies. When asked about former president Trump’s protectionism in a BBC interview, Milei elaborated the basis of their mutual affection: “The most important thing is that he clearly identifies the enemy. He identifies with total clarity that the enemy is socialism.” Indeed, the figures’ similarities are not rooted in national policy, but the discourse in which those policies are delivered: liberty, interpreted as the triumph of a narrowly defined social group.
The largely successful campaign to release the June 12th detainees, culminating in Friday’s concert for the last two, affirmed the energy and organizing capacity of Argentina’s left. It remains to be seen how these movements, especially Indigenous and human rights organizations, will respond to the Ley Bases’ unfettered extractivism and foreign investment incentives. Given the initial backlash to the law and its questionable long-term benefits, however, Milei will likely continue to rely on the full reach of Bullrich’s security protocol.