¡Buenos días from Greenway Parks! This is the Rorshok Argentina Update from the 16th of October twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what's going down in Argentina.

The big story this week is a massive economic lifeline from the United States. Following the high-level talks that we covered in last week’s episode, the US has already started buying Argentine pesos to prop up the currency. This comes after weeks of the government burning through its own reserves to keep the peso from collapsing.

This major financial intervention came just before President Milei traveled to Washington for a meeting with US President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday the 14th. But there’s a catch: President Trump made it clear that this financial support depends heavily on the outcome of this month’s midterm elections on the 26th of October. He essentially said that if Milei’s political opponents, whom he referred to as socialists, win, the US would feel very differently about its investment.

Let’s turn to the economy at home. Inflation numbers for September are in, and consumer prices rose by 2.2% percent. That brings the total inflation for the first nine months of the year to 22%. While that might sound high, it’s a huge drop from the over 200% percent inflation we saw in previous years.

The biggest price hikes last month were in housing, water, electricity and gas, which all went up by about 3%. On the flip side, restaurants and hotels saw the smallest increase at just over 1%, which might suggest people are cutting back on eating out. This is the last major economic update before the midterm elections, and slowing inflation has been one of the government’s key achievements, even if it came with tough spending cuts.

And connected to the cost of living, we also saw a new report on the basic food basket. In September, a family of four needed over 1.1 million pesos just to avoid being considered poor. To stay above the extreme poverty line, that same family needed a little over 500,000 pesos.

Of course, the daily cost of living is directly tied to the value of the peso, which is why there was some confusion this week following mixed messages from the government. Federico Sturzenegger, President Milei’s deregulation advisor, said that Argentina will have a floating exchange rate pretty soon.

However, just a few days earlier, Caputo stated that the country would maintain its current currency band system. This back-and-forth has left investors and the public a bit confused about the country’s currency policy moving forward.

Now for an update on the political turmoil we’ve been following. Last week, we mentioned that José Luis Espert, the libertarian deputy, had dropped out of the race in Buenos Aires province after his links to a businessman accused of drug trafficking were revealed. This week, the story continued to unfold as police raided Espert’s home and office as part of a money laundering investigation. He had previously admitted to receiving two hundred thousand dollars from the businessman.

To make things more complicated for the ruling party, the National Electoral Board rejected their request to reprint the ballots for the Buenos Aires province. This means voters will still see Espert’s face on the ticket when they head to the polls. The court said reprinting would be too expensive and would set a bad precedent for future elections.

Shifting gears to some big investment news, the US tech company OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, announced a massive twenty-five-billion-dollar project to build an artificial intelligence data center in Patagonia. This will be the first of its kind in Latin America. The project, called Stargate Argentina, is a partnership with the local firm Sur Energy.

The plan is to create a huge AI hub that will serve the entire region. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said he was impressed by President Milei’s vision for how AI can drive growth and creativity in Argentina. This investment will fall under RIGI, the government’s new incentive scheme for large investments, which offers long-term tax and customs benefits to attract foreign capital.

And speaking of big investments, the government has also given the green light to a major new copper mining project in the west-central San Juan province. The Canadian firm McEwen Copper is set to invest over two-point-six billion dollars to develop the Los Azules project in the Andes, near the Chilean border.

This is the eighth project approved under the RIGI incentive scheme, bringing the total planned investments to nearly sixteen billion dollars. The government says the Los Azules mine will create over 3,000 jobs and generate over a billion dollars in annual exports once it’s up and running. The company has also committed to using local suppliers for more than 60% of its spending.

In international news with a strong local connection, there was a sense of relief this week as Hamas released twenty living hostages from Gaza after more than two years in captivity. Among them were three Argentine-Israelis: David Cunio, Ariel Cunio, and Eitan Horn.

The Milei government celebrated their release and credited Donald Trump as the architect of the breakthrough. The President’s office honored the courage and resilience of the hostages, who they said had survived inhumane and prolonged captivity. The body of a fourth Argentine hostage, Lior Rudaeff, whose death was confirmed last year, has not yet been recovered.

Back to domestic politics, the lower house of Congress passed a bill aimed at limiting the president’s power to govern by decree. President Milei has frequently used these decrees of necessity and urgency, or DNUs, to push through major reforms.

The new bill, which now returns to the Senate for a final vote, would require both chambers of Congress to approve any decree with an absolute majority within ninety days. If one chamber rejects it, the decree would be struck down. This is a significant move by the opposition to put more checks on presidential power.

Now, an update on a story from last week, when we mentioned President Milei’s rock-star-style book launch at the Movistar Arena. This week, there are some lingering questions about who paid for the elaborate event. The President’s spokesperson said it was privately funded by the book’s publisher, Hojas del Sur.

However, many are wondering how a small publishing house could afford to rent a 15,000-seat stadium, with some estimates putting the cost as high as 300,000 dollars. The publishing house has a history of promoting far-right authors and its owner is linked to organizing right-wing political events, leading to questions about the true source of the funding.

On a much more somber note, a tragic case from Chaco province has highlighted the ongoing issue of femicide in Argentina. The body of Gabriela Arací Barrios, a twenty-year-old woman, was found buried in a pit at a house in the small town of Avia Terai.

She had been missing for two days before police, with the help of sniffer dogs, made the discovery. A thirty-three-year-old man, who was reportedly the last person to see her alive, has been arrested and charged with her murder.

That’s not the only femicide case this week. A Uruguayan men’s rights activist is accused of a brutal crime spree in the central Córdoba province. Police say Pablo Laurta kayaked to Argentina, murdered the man who drove him from the border, and then shot and killed his ex-partner and her mother in their home. After the murders, he kidnapped his six-year-old son and fled, but authorities captured him in a hotel before he could escape back to Uruguay.

Women’s rights groups are concerned that cases of femicide have been rising and worry about the impact of recent cuts to gender-based violence prevention programs.

To end on a lighter note, a recommended read: The Financial Times published an article on traveling through the Puna de Atacama, a remote and sparsely populated high-altitude desert in the northwest of Argentina. The article shows the unique geology and natural beauty of the region, including the Campo de Piedra Pómez, or Pumice Field, and the salt flats.

Check it out with the link in the show notes!

Aaand that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us!

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¡Nos vemos la próxima semana!