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SPEAKER: Lucas Poy, VU Amsterdam
DISCUSSANT: Michiel Baud, CEDLA - UvA
DATE: 5 April
TIME: 15.30-17.00, followed by drinks and snacks
ACTIVITY: CEDLA LECTURE
His campaign videos, featuring a chainsaw as a symbol of his promise to cut state expenses, captured global attention. Since his inauguration as Argentina’s president in December 2023, Javier Milei has lived up to his promise, implementing neoliberal reforms, layoffs, and privatizations. Venturing into historical comparisons, Milei claimed that he wants to restore Argentina to its past glory, asserting that it was ‘the richest country in the world’ in the early 20th century. He refers to a period when Argentina was governed by an oligarchic regime that combined liberal economic policies with fraudulent electoral practices. The claim that Argentina experienced a ‘golden age’ under such liberal governments remains more than dubious. The prosperity was certainly not experienced by the mass of workers who tirelessly contributed to the export boom in rural settings, nor by those who worked in factories and dwelled in tenement houses in the big cities. It was even less golden for the indigenous population, systematically displaced and subjected to violence. In this lecture, Dr. Lucas Poy provides an overview of Argentina during the years of the ‘orden conservador’ (1880-1916), focusing on the main weaknesses of the export boom, the working and living conditions of the working class, and their struggles for labour and democratic rights.
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