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It is November 25, 2024, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and we are gathered in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. With the feminist collective Ni Una Menos we are here to witness the first public trial organized by the Union of Workers from the Popular Economy (UTEP) against the “starvers of the people.” The first anniversary of the far-right government of Javier Milei is approaching, and his administration has applied a new cycle of neoliberal shock unprecedented in its speed and capacity for harm.
Along with Milei, the defendants in this popular trial are the Minister of Economy Luis Caputo, also known as “serial indebtor” for his role in taking on national debt during the government of businessman Mauricio Macri in 2018; the Minister of Security Patricia Bullrich, who is devoted to repressing social protest; and Sandra Petovello, the minister of the first department of “Human Capital,” also known for denying food to community kitchens. This trial is one more of the various awareness-raising actions the UTEP has organized to denounce the government’s failure to distribute food aid. After listening to interventions by the workers, the trial concluded with a public sentencing declaring the officials guilty.
In this first year of austerity under Milei, we have not left the streets. Their occupation follows the rhythm of the many conflicts set off by Milei’s administration, including massive worker layoffs, budget cuts, and targeted cruelty towards feminist and LGBTTIQ+ collectives that permeates the political and social scene. The transfeminist struggle to denounce indebtedness as a tool of dispossession and violence has been fundamental to understanding and confronting the political and economic orientation of this government.
Indebting Oneself to Live
To live in Argentina as a woman, lesbian, travesti, queer, or trans person means going into debt. It means working informally, or working in a neighborhood soup kitchen where, furthermore, food is no longer available. It means living in a country in which the government is applying an economic experiment that is increasing poverty and putting the survival capacity of a large part of the population in crisis. It means taking care of and managing scarce income and taking on more and more debt to live: debt with neighborhood financial institutions, debt with informal lenders, debt through cell phones, and debt through Apps from online platforms that offer loans with a single click.
Indebting oneself to live means dedicating part of everyday life to permanent debt management in order to resolve daily needs. And it has become a widespread condition in our country.
In recent years, the issue of household debt has reached a level of public debate that was nonexistent before. In the book A Feminist Reading of Debt, co-written with Verónica Gago, we narrate this process of politicization. We discovered high rates of debt among women, associated with the structural adjustment conditions imposed by the agreement signed between the Argentine government and the International Monetary Fund in 2018. We also saw a shift in the purpose of debt, now increasingly taken on for the purchase of basic goods and services necessary for social reproduction. This is what we have called “endeudarse para vivir” or “indebting oneself to live.” In combination with the process of feminist politicization on the rise since 2017, the issue of debt has taken on more visibility as a public problem.
The scene at Plaza de Mayo, an iconic site of resistance for women and sexual dissidents, demonstrates transfeminist creativity in the face of Milei’s so-called anarchocapitalism that seeks to intensify the forms of impoverishment that affect women, lesbians, travestis, and trans people the most. Tracing these processes of impoverishment also reveals a long history of pedagogical work within the transfeminist movement, through which we can identify the links between cis-hetero-patriarchal violence and financial and real estate plunder.
Digital Finance as a Source of Indebtedness
On that same day in the Plaza de Mayo, the Ni Una Menos Collective also carried out a popular trial against Marcos Galperín, a paradigmatic businessman who represents the economic model of this government. We occupied the streets in front of the Casa Rosada, where Milei works, along with the main representatives of UTEP, Norma Morales, Dina Sanchez and Johana Duarte. Meanwhile, cooperative members, textile workers, travesti cooperatives, street vendors, and union members gathered around the panel of judges. Together, we all organize through a transveral approach to politics, putting first those most affected by the government’s adjustment policies.
Why did we put Marco Galperín on trial? Through his platform Mercado Pago, this businessman is profiting from the massive indebtedness of women, lesbians, travestis, and trans people who work primarily in the informal sector. Mercado Pago is a digital platform that offers, among other functions, access to credit, and the company is subsidized by the Argentine state. Its owner, Galperín, is a public figure known for his racist statements and, lately, for his support of the privatization of education. He also owns the digital commerce platform MercadoLibre, known as the eBay of Latin America, which operates in 18 countries in the region. Galperín is the richest person in Argentina, although he has moved to Uruguay to pay lower taxes. From there, sitting at his computer with a view of the sea, he gives his opinion on all issues of national relevance and does not hide his support for the far-right government.
Since Milei’s assumption of power, the beneficiaries of various social programs—such as pensions and the universal child allowance—can choose to collect their payment via Galperín’s virtual wallet, Mercado Pago. This is the latest, and perhaps most important, gift that the government has granted its favorite “entrepreneur.” Galperín benefits through the possibility of speculating with the money deposited from social benefits. In addition, he becomes the owner of one of the most important assets in this algorithmic and financialized capitalist system: the personal data of thousands if not millions of beneficiaries.
Galperín’s newest business in social benefits illustrates how a large part of today’s financial business is carried out on the backs of lower income workers. And contrary to what the government says—that those who work at home or do community work are unproductive—it is on these people’s labor that the expansion of financialized business relies. As justification, the government announced that the use of Mercado Pago would eliminate “intermediaries,” clearly a false argument since previously the benefits were paid directly to recipients by banks. This argument has only served to legitimize Mercado Pago as the vanguard of a financialized social welfare system that benefits these companies in multiple ways.
Since the pandemic, financial technology (FINTECH) companies have consolidated and expanded as a means of payment and, above all, as sources of debt. In a context of falling incomes, and one in which many popular economy ventures are increasingly managed through digital platforms, this multiplies the possibility of taking on debts at more usurious rates than those of banks and with greater vulnerability to scams given the scant regulation that exists in the digital space. We are in a context in which women, lesbians, travestis, and trans people—and above all people who do care and community work—are doing a triple shift.
With the current deregulation of the economy, particularly the effects of Decree 70/2023 emitted in December 2023—which deregulated the prices of rent, food, and medicine, among other measures—we have seen a jump in the cost of goods and services that sustain the domestic economy. Added to this is an inflationary process that, though already very high, worsened after the devaluation of the Argentine peso, triggering higher levels of over-indebtedness and creating new thresholds of economic violence in the household economy.
In denial of this reality, Milei continually pays tribute to the “heroic businessmen” like Galperín who flee with the country’s money, escaping from “the clutches of the oppressive state.” Thus, the president personifies a utopian brand of capital that moves without regulations in a world adapted to sacrifice zones. It is a mobility that leaves devastated territories in its wake.
The “heroic businessman” is the figure of this era of wealth obscenely concentrated in the hands of a few white, heterosexual men who deny the state’s contributions to the growth of their companies. At the same time, once they flee with their capital, they accuse those who sustain the country of being unproductive.
In this context of brutal adjustment, grassroots transfeminisms continue to insist from and in the streets that those who do care and community work are the true heroes. This is not to romanticize their work in order to not pay for it—as was done during the pandemic with workers from the informal economy—but to show that those who do care work in homes and neighborhoods do so without enjoying tax exemptions, while also paying taxes on food, often working without pay and having to manage debts at very high interest rates.
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Translated from Spanish by NACLA.
Lucía Cavallero is a sociologist and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires. Her research is focused on debt and gender. She is an organizer with Ni Una Menos, a grass-roots feminist movement that advocates against gender-based violence. She is co-author of A Feminist Reading of Debt and The Home as Laboratory: Finance, Housing, and Feminist Struggle.