A crowd in Argentina repudiates Milei’s adjustment to public universities

Professors and students from public universities in Argentina staged a massive protest this Wednesday against the president’s intention Javier Miley to veto a law that guarantees greater financing for university education, in check by the severe adjustment applied by the Government.

The mobilization had its epicenter in the square in front of the headquarters of the Argentine Parliament, in Buenos Aires, but there were also protest marches in other cities of the country, with the support of unions and opposition political sectors.

“Students from all over Argentina ask the president, in a cry for help to save the system, to enact the university financing law,” demanded professors, students and university directors in a joint document read during the mobilization, in coincidence with a sector strike throughout the country.

The law, approved on September 13 by Parliament, establishes updating the funds for operating expenses of universities due to the variation in the inflation rate, which in August stood at 236.7% year-on-year.

Also, order a recomposition of university salaries, also taking inflation into account.

But Milei has warned that he will veto the law, as he did recently with an initiative to establish pension increases, claiming that will not compromise the objective of fiscal balance set by its Executive.

According to calculations by the Congressional Budget Office, the law, if implemented, has an equivalent budget impact at 0.14 of GDP, Therefore, the university community considers that it does not substantially affect public accounts.

Teachers and students had already made a massive march last April due to the insufficient funds for guarantee the functioning of public universities, access to which has been free for students since 1949.

“I would not have been able to study if the university had not been public and free because my father was a worker and my mother was a housewife. Public education makes up the identity of Argentines. We cannot imagine ourselves without this university open to everyone. who wants to study,” he told EFE Beatriz Romero, economist graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, one of the most prestigious in Latin America.

The Milei Government, which since its inception last December, has applied strong spending cuts to recover Argentina’s fiscal balance, calls the university system “expensive, inequitable and inefficient”

According to official data, in Argentina there are 1,749,136 students registered in the 65 state-run university centers in the country, of which only 40.6% (710,466) are regular students and have a low graduation rate.

The Ministry of Human Capital, to which the Ministry of Education depends, maintains that the State allocates 74% of the educational budget to universities, which it accuses of not accounting for the transferred funds.

“This university conflict responds more to political interests than to the needs of the educational system, because The educational complaints are all attended to and resolved,” the portfolio assured in a statement.

But this Wednesday’s massive protest shows that there is much to resolve in public university education, whose teachers in many cases earn salaries below the poverty line.

“If Milei vetoes the law, many teachers are going to leave because, obviously, with these starvation salaries you cannot live. Maybe this is what the president wants: that there are more and more ignorant people and fewer thinking people. Maybe so he convinces them with the screams he gives every day,” he told EFE. Jorge Etcharrán, professor at the National University of Hurlingham, who, with 25 years as a teacher, earns barely 400 dollars a month, less than half of a basic basket.

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