Police in Argentina have fired rubber bullets to disperse protesters gathered outside Congress in Buenos Aires as lawmakers debated newly elected President Javier Milei’s sweeping economic, social and political reform package.
Opposition legislators stormed out of the building at one point to observe and denounce the police action, but later went back inside to take their seats and the debate resumed until past midnight.
The 53-year-old political outsider – a libertarian and self-described anarcho-capitalist – won a resounding election victory last October on a wave of fury over decades of economic crises marked by debt, rampant money printing, inflation and fiscal deficit.
Milei began his term by devaluing the peso by more than 50 percent, cutting state subsidies for fuel and transport, reducing the number of ministries by half, and scrapping hundreds of rules so as to deregulate the economy.
