Milei wrecking Argentina’s inclusive culture built over the years: activists
When Luana Salva got her
rst formal job after years of prostitution, she was ecstatic.
A quota law in Argentina that promoted the inclusion of transgender people in the work force — unprecedented in Latin America expect in neighbouring Uruguay — pulled her from the streets into the Foreign Ministry last year.
Yet just months after Ms. Salva got her rst pay cheque , right-wing President Javier Milei entered oce and began slashing public spending as part of his state overhaul to solve Argentina’s worst economic crisis in two decades. Abruptly red in a wave of government lay-os, Ms. Salva’s world began to unravel. “The only option left is prostitution,” Ms. Salva, 43, said. “This government is unaware of all that has been built to make us feel included.” Ms. Salva’s sudden reversal of fortunes reects the political whiplash being felt across Argentina. Past Left-leaning Presidents who enacted some of the most socially liberal policies on the continent have given way to a selfproclaimed “anarcho-capitalist” whose ery appraisals of social justice and efforts to dismantle diversity and equity programmes have made him into a global far-Right icon.
Few in Argentina are more enraged by Mr. Milei’s anti-woke agenda than LGBTQ activists, who worry his government is rolling back their hard-won gains. Since drawing attention as a brash TV personality, Mr. Milei has lambasted feminist and human rights movements as a “cult of a gender ideology.”
After taking oce in December, Mr. Milei wasted no time jumping into Argentina’s culture wars. He shut down the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity, banned the government’s use of gender-inclusive language and closed the National Institute against Discrimination, ◣enophobia
and Racism.
In an announcement timed for International Women’s Day on March 8, Mr. Milei renamed the Women’s Hall in the presidential palace to Hall of Heroes. To the delight of his conservative fans — and the outrage of tens of thousands of women’s rights protesters outside his residence — he had portraits of historical female leaders in the room taken down and replaced with those featuring Argentina’s founding fathers and soldiers.
“Unfortunately, we are going backward,” said Alba Rueda, a transgender woman activist and diversity adviser in the former centre-Left government of President Alberto Fernández.
“What we have achieved is being discredited,” Ms. Rueda said.