As the world absorbs the shockwave of Donald Trump’s win in the US presidential election, the playbook for his second term, designed by a handful of right-wing extremists, is already underway in Argentina.
Project 2025 is set out in a nearly 900-page ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise’, produced by the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing US think tank, as a ready reckoner for the incoming Trump administration. It details authoritarian tactics that exist in various parts of the world, from attacking public education to dismantling policies to tackle climate change to restricting the rights of women, LGBTIQ+ people, migrants, workers and Black people. But if there is one country already trying some of Project 2025’s most extreme policies to weaken the state and render the enjoyment of rights obsolete, it is Argentina.
“If you have any doubts about how Project 2025 would be implemented, you have to look at what has happened in the last year in Argentina”, human rights lawyer Paula Ávila-Guillén, told me in a thought-provoking interview. She is the executive director of the Women’s Equality Center (WEC) which works on communication strategies on reproductive health and justice in Latin America.
I knew what was happening in my country Argentina. A 30% cut in state spending and an eleven percentage point increase in poverty in less than a year don’t go unnoticed – even if you don’t live there. Nor do the struggles that family and friends go through in a society already used to economic crashes. Still, Ávila-Guillén’s provocation prompted me to delve into the way Project 2025 is being carried out back home.
Project 2025 has been spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, but includes an advisory board with more than one hundred other Christian right and far right groups and dozens of former Trump officials.
“I’m the one destroying the state from within”.
“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration”, the Heritage Foundation says on its website to introduce Project 2025.
In the months leading up to election day, as Project 2025’s authoritarian goals were increasingly documented by the press, hate watch groups and trade unions, Trump tried to distance himself from it.
Javier Milei, president of Argentina since December last year and an emerging figurehead of the global far right, has never mentioned Project 2025. But he had been looking to establish ties with the Heritage Foundation since at least 2023, according to documents submitted by a lobbyist to the US Department of Justice.
And a copy of the ‘Mandate for Leadership’ was handed to Milei by Heritage’s executive vice-president Derrick Morgan when the two met in Washington in February for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), according to Argentina’s government website which lists gifts received by the president.
A central goal of Project 2025 is to “dismantle the administrative state” allegedly co-opted by the left or wokism. It entails disbanding federal ministries and agencies, cutting public funding for health, education and welfare, and eliminating programmes and resources to combat gender-based violence, discrimination, pollution and climate change.
Milei has worked fast in his first ten months in power and has followed this script entirely. The argument for many of his new measures has been the need to lower public spending to balance a lopsided economy, with an annual inflation at 211% and a huge debt owed to the International Monetary Fund. There is nothing wrong with cutting superfluous spending of course, but Milei has gone so much further than anyone might have initially imagined, in what many have dubbed his “chainsaw-style approach” to reducing the size of the state.
“I love being the mole inside the state”, Milei said in an interview in June. “I’m the one destroying the state from within”.
Milei has made an unprecedented cut to all public spending at close to 30%. He cut investment in education by 40%, denied increases to pensions, cut access to life-saving drugs for cancer patients, defunded the science and technology system and universities, and laid off almost 27,000 public employees.
He closed the public media and froze food distribution to soup kitchens. Now, he’s set to sell-off public companies in the fields of nuclear energy, aviation, fuel, mining, electricity, water, cargo transport, roads and railways.
Milei has eliminated nine ministries, including the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and the Ministry of Education – something that the ‘Mandate for Leadership’ mentions and Trump has also spoken about.
Milei is actively persecuting civil servants who don’t follow his mindset.
Milei has dismantled all gender policies and defunded services including those for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Last year, more than 170,000 people accessed these services, while official figures show that a femicide is committed every 35 hours in Argentina. It is now unclear whether anyone will continue to keep track of these statistics.
He also closed the Institute against Discrimination, Racism and Xenophobia, which he called a “sinister body used for ideological persecution”. Project 2025 authors would no doubt be delighted. Their blueprint for Trump goes to great lengths to explain how every diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy, programme and fund must be removed.
The ‘Mandate for Leadership’ details the need to assemble an army of loyalists from day one to carry out this task of reducing the state. The Heritage Foundation has a database of some 20,000 people in the US who would make up a transitional staff for Trump. But it would require firing tens of thousands of career civil servants to replace them with people loyal to their ideology and ban public employees’ right to unionise.
Milei is actively persecuting civil servants who don’t follow his mindset. In a letter to the diplomatic corps, he demanded those who don’t align with his foreign policy ideas to “step aside”, specifically referencing his plan to repudiate the UN’s Agenda 2030 which governments have signed to combat poverty, inequality and environmental destruction.
Days later, in a statement, he announced a purge: “The executive branch will launch an audit of the career staff of the foreign ministry with the aim of identifying promoters of anti-freedom ideas”.
War on gender
According to Project 2025, the next US president must “remove from every existing rule, regulatory agency, contract, grant, regulation, and federal law the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights”.
Abortion is mentioned 199 times in the document, including proposing a federal ban, increased criminalisation, more restrictions on providing care for miscarriages and obstetric emergencies, defunding emergency contraception and strict surveillance systems on people who have abortions or suffer miscarriages.
Heritage also wants to impose its worldview across borders: restore the so-called ‘Mexico City policy’, which prohibits any US public funding to foreign non-governmental organisations if they include any abortion-related activity – even if they do so with their own funds.
The right to abortion, legalised in 2020 in Argentina, is in danger under Milei. His party introduced a bill to repeal abortion which he’s referred to as “aggravated murder”. He’s also defunded the distribution of abortion pills and contraceptives.
Milei eliminated a programme to prevent teenage pregnancy and has not set aside any funds in the 2025 budget for comprehensive sex education – which is mandatory by law and considered essential to prevent child abuse. Instead, authorities hired the Chilean Catholic organisation Teen Star, that promotes abstinence, for training teachers in charge of CSE.
The right to abortion, legalised in 2020 in Argentina, is in danger under Milei.
Milei banned the use of gender inclusive language in public services, and put a Catholic lawyer, Ursula Basset, in the foreign ministry to review all the country’s positions on gender and climate change. At the last Organisation of American States General Assembly, Basset stymied the negotiations by demanding the removal of “LGBTI people”, “gender”, “tolerance”, “climate change” and “families” from agreed intergovernmental statements.
“Argentina was the only G20 country to oppose the Ministerial Declaration on Gender Equality,” signed last month in Rio, Ávila-Guillén told me. The disagreement stemmed from the fact that “family care” was defined as work and the term “reproductive rights” was mentioned. Argentina ended up in a more extreme position than Saudi Arabia or Russia.
Respectability and academic tone is just a veneer for hate in ‘Mandate for Leadership’. You only need to skim the document to find polarising language and the construction of an internal enemy. Milei likewise calls his opponents “rats”, “human excrement”, “fucking lefties”, “imbeciles” or “traitors”.
“The idea that Milei is the most Argentinian thing that could happen to Argentina is ridiculous; he is part of a much bigger agenda, crafted in the US and which is trying to be implemented in different parts of the world”, Ávila-Guillén says.
The lobbyist that connected Milei with the Heritage Foundation last year is Damián Merlo, partner director of Latin America Advisory Group, a company which lobbies in the US on behalf of authoritarian Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. Merlo is close to digital strategist Fernando Cerimedo, who also works for Milei and has done so for the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Cerimedo is currently under investigation in Brazil for his alleged role in the 2022 failed coup attempt led by Bolsonaro against Brazilian president Inácio Lula da Silva.
When Milei took office, he warned the Argentine people that their economic plight might briefly worsen under his harsh measures. This is exactly what millions are now suffering: more poverty and recession.
In the last days of the US election campaign, a similar message was spread by billionaire Elon Musk who put more than $100m into Trump’s campaign, and who would be, according to Trump, his “secretary of cost-cutting”. Such cuts, Musk warned, might cause “temporary hardship”, but they were necessary in the path to “long-term prosperity”.
Prosperity for whom is not clear – but a recipe for hardship, denial of rights and persecution is on display in Argentina, if you can bear to take a look.
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