Argentina’s leader cuts 15K state jobs
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, April 4, (AP): Argentina said Wednesday that it had cut 15,000 state jobs as part of President Javier Milei’s aggressive campaign to slash spending, the latest in a series of painful economic measures that have put the libertarian government on a collision course with angry protesters and powerful trade unions.
Presidential spokesperson Manuel Adorni announced the job cuts in a news conference, portraying them as key to Milei’s promised shake-up of Argentina’s bloated public sector.
“It’s part of the work we are doing to reduce state expenses,” he told reporters, describing the dismissed workers as a drag on taxpayers.
“They perhaps did not have a very defined job,” he said.
Hundreds of defiant employees - some notified of their termination last week and others before that - stormed their workplaces in Buenos Aires and nearby cities on Wednesday, beating drums, decrying their dismissal as unjust and demanding their reinstatement.
Despite the rain, crowds wearing the green T-shirts of the country’s biggest union, The Association of State Workers, or ATE, swelled outside national ministries. In some cases, scuffles erupted as police struggled to evict protesters from government buildings.
Workers at ministries that Milei has vowed to close, such as the National Institute Against Discrimination, along with a range of state agencies - including the ministries for the economy, energy and social security - received the latest layoff notices.
“These layoffs have a face, they have a family, they have real needs in this context of great change and great poverty in Argentina,” Mercedes Cabezas, a secretary-general of ATE, told The Associated Press outside the Ministry of Labor as protesters pumped their fists and chanted around her.
Poverty
“The impact runs very deep because it’s combined with the reduction of social programs, so what we end up with is increasing poverty,” she said.
Milei campaigned for president while brandishing a chainsaw - promising to fix Argentina’s long-troubled economy by chopping down the size of the state. Determined to balance the country’s budget, he has slashed energy and transportation subsidies, halted public works, cut payments to provincial governments and devalued the peso by over 50% to close the gap between the official exchange rate and the black market rate.
However, that has hiked inflation, making it even harder for struggling Argentines to make ends meet.
Even before last week, when 41-year-old Hernán Silva still had his job at the National Road Safety Agency that paid a basic monthly salary of $250, he was stressed about not having enough money “for anything” as the prices of fuel, meat and medication surged.
“I was barely making it to the end of the month,” he said. After 14 years at the road safety agency, his boss called last Wednesday to tell him - and 20 of his colleagues - it was their final day.
Silva and his colleagues tried to force their way into their office on Wednesday - the first day back at work after a holiday week in Argentina - but gave up when managers threatened to call the police.
“My only plan right now is to fight for my job because this is unfair,” he said. Neither he nor his colleagues had received official termination notices.
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MEXICO CITY: A Mexican drug cartel not only forced vendors to buy chicken at wildly inflated prices - they sold them chicken “not fit for human consumption,” investigators concluded this week.
Prosecutors in the State of Mexico this week concluded a monthslong investigation that found the hyper-violent Familia Michoacana cartel had been forcing small stores and market vendors to buy chicken at almost twice the normal price.
But to add insult to injury, test results released Monday on chicken found at one cartel-controlled warehouse in the city of Toluca - just west of Mexico City - found additives, some of which prosecutors said were potentially cancer-causing.
State prosecutors said they are “continuing with investigations of two warehouses seized on March 27 in Toluca because of their presumed links with extortion, and crimes against consumers.”
“The seized food products are not fit for human consumption,” the report said, citing the presence of potassium and sodium tartrate, among other additives found in the chicken.
The investigation began in December, when, days before Christmas, four chicken-processing workers were abducted from one of the warehouses.
Strangely, in a country where kidnap victims are often never seen again, the four men were found later unharmed and freed from a vehicle.
Prosecutors said last week they later discovered the workers at the warehouse had been abducted by the gang as part of a dispute with rivals, because the kidnappers wanted that warehouse for themselves.
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SAN SALVADOR: At least 241 people have died in El Salvador prisons since the start of President Nayib Bukele’s “war on gangs” two years ago, according to the organization Humanitarian Legal Relief.
Ingrid Escobar, director of the rights organization, said they received 500 reports of deaths in state custody, but they have confirmed about half, including two minors. Last year, the organization documented 126 deaths, just half of the number they documented this year.
In March 2022, Bukele announced a “state of exception,” waiving many constitutional rights to combat the gangs that have terrorized the Central American nation.
Since then, El Salvador has arrested 80,000 people - more than 1% of the country’s population - throwing them into prison, often with little evidence of their ties to gangs and almost no access to due process. The prisons have been likened to torture chambers, with horrifying conditions.
According to the NGO report, “of these deaths, 44% died of violent death, serious torture, 29% due to lack of medical attention.”
While the government is accused of committing mass human rights abuses in their crackdown, Bukele remains highly popular in El Salvador because the homicide rates sharply dipped following the detentions.