The sign Claudia Ferdeghini holds aloft at a left-wing political rally in the Argentine capital’s tony Palermo district could hardly be more direct: “We will not be one more star on the Yankee flag,” it reads.
For good measure, the stars and stripes pictured on the sign are engulfed in flames.
As others around her hoist unflattering portraits of U.S. President Donald Trump and Argentina’s President Javier Milei, Ms. Ferdeghini, a Workers’ Socialist Party activist, explains her message.
Why We Wrote This
The Trump administration’s pursuit of “a new economic Monroe Doctrine,” in which the United States extends a hand to the president’s ideological soulmates in Latin America, as was the case in Argentina, is stirring historical suspicions of U.S. motives.
“Trump says he wants to help Argentina and his friend Milei with his financial assistance, but no one lends billions and billions of dollars just to be nice,” says the retired grandmother, smiling broadly.
“He wants our natural resources; he wants our minerals like lithium; he wants to control other economies like imperial powers have always done,” she adds. “But we are not Trump’s colony. We are a sovereign nation.”
The boisterous demonstration in a park within earshot of the U.S. Embassy revolves around a number of favorite leftist themes, from Mr. Milei’s harsh austerity program to Gaza and the Palestinian cause.
But none seems to motivate the crowd of several hundred quite like Mr. Trump’s $40 billion bailout package of currency swaps and credit lines aimed at propping up a teetering Argentine economy.
The initial $20 billion in currency swaps, put in place earlier this month, is widely credited with rescuing Argentina’s sinking peso from an untimely collapse. Such a collapse almost certainly would have been devastating for Mr. Milei’s prospects in crucial national legislative elections last Sunday.
Cristina Sille Elections/Reuters
Instead, the relative calm provided by the bailout seems to have been enough to reassure Argentines about Mr. Milei’s management of the economy – and thus give him the support he needs in Congress to continue his drastic reorganizing (and downsizing) of the Argentine state.
It’s exactly the outcome Mr. Trump wanted from a bailout that is part of what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unabashedly calls “a new economic Monroe Doctrine.”
In practice, that means the United States will extend a hand to Mr. Trump’s ideological soulmates in the region while firing broadsides at any country that dares to stand up to or challenge him, from Canada and Brazil to Colombia. Mr. Trump has called Mr. Milei, a libertarian iconoclast, “my favorite president.”
Renewed U.S. activism
The administration’s talk of a new Monroe Doctrine signals a new era of U.S. activism in the hemisphere after two decades of neglect, analysts say. And while a U.S. rescue package for a foreign country is hardly an everyday occurrence, it is also not unheard of.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton directed $20 billion in Treasury currency stabilization funds to be lent to Mexico as part of an international rescue package to stabilize a collapsing peso. Since then, the U.S. has only bought another country’s currency four times, including the recent Argentine peso purchase, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
For Mr. Trump, the new doctrine is working. “We’re getting a real strong handle on South America,” the president said Monday on his way to Asia in response to journalists’ questions about Mr. Milei’s election win. “He [Mr. Milei] got a lot of strong support from us.”
Mr. Trump’s rescue of Argentina’s economy – and of Mr. Milei politically – makes perfect sense in the eyes of many experts here.
“Trump wants to be the leader of the world’s new right, and Milei is that new-right leader in Latin America,” says Juan Luis Bour, chief economist at FIEL, the Foundation for Economic Research in Latin America, in Buenos Aires.
“Milei is doing the things Trump thinks countries should do, like shrinking the state and slashing public sector jobs, so of course Trump would want to do what he could to avoid Milei’s failure,” he says. “Even better if he can give an unfinished reform agenda a new boost.”
In the days since the election victory, a triumphant Mr. Milei has said he plans to move on quickly to two key pieces of his vision for a new Argentina: labor law reform and an overhaul of the retirement system.
But the Trump bailout also risks reviving latent misgivings among Argentines about what such a close relationship with the U.S. might mean.
Mr. Bour cites recent polls showing about 45% of the population – which he assumes is “mostly people on the political left” – opposed to the U.S. bailout, with about 30% favorable or very favorable.
“There’s always a streak of anti-Yankee sentiment in Argentina,” he says, “just as there is across the region.”
Who benefits?
Fury over U.S. intervention in Argentina goes back at least as far as the mid-1940s, when a U.S. ambassador openly campaigned against the populist president, Juan Perón. U.S. support for the military dictatorship in the late 1970s and early ’80s remains raw for some, while the U.S. taking Britain’s side in the 1982 Falklands (Malvinas) War was seen by many as a blow from a hemispheric neighbor.
Argentines who remain dubious about the intent of the Trump bailout are anxious to point out that the second half of the $40 billion package is private sector financing through major U.S. banks.
Indeed, in the days leading up to Sunday’s vote, the Buenos Aires press ran front-page stories chronicling the visits of top U.S. investment bankers to the Argentine capital. Some reports highlighted unnamed Milei officials revealing the government steps that the bankers were demanding in exchange for the financing.
Such reports fed the idea circulating on the streets that the Trump bailout isn’t about helping Argentina at all, but about rescuing the investments of the U.S. president’s wealthy backers.
Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor
Secretary Bessent has taken great umbrage at such speculation.
“This trope that we’re helping out wealthy Americans with interests down there couldn’t be more false,” he told CNBC recently. “What we’re doing is maintaining a U.S. strategic interest in the Western Hemisphere.”
Competition with China
For many analysts, that “strategic interest” wouldn’t be anywhere near what it is without China’s expanding, and in some ways already dominant, presence in the region.
“More than anything, this is a geopolitical issue,” says FIEL’s Mr. Bour. Noting that Argentina has an $18 billion swap deal with China, he says the U.S. wanted to prevent Argentina – South America’s second-largest economy – from becoming any more beholden to China than it already is.
“The U.S. doesn’t want Argentina to use any more of the China swap,” Mr. Bour says, “which is one reason why the U.S. package has fewer restrictions than China’s.”
Indeed, Mr. Bessent said in a recent Fox News interview that the U.S. was acting in order to stop China from gaining more influence in the region. And he said Mr. Milei is on board with that goal, asserting that the Argentine leader is “committed to getting China out of Argentina.”
That seems unlikely, given China’s importance to the Argentine economy.
In any case, it’s the U.S., and not China, that some Argentines – or at least those of the traditional anti-Yankee left gathered in a Buenos Aires park recently – want out of their country.
“Trump is taking advantage of Argentina’s weakness to swoop in and take our natural riches,” says Carlos Toledo, a directorate committee member with the Workers’ Socialist Movement in Moreno, a city in Buenos Aires province. “Milei is more than happy to go along with that to stay in power, but we the people are not.”
As for what he thinks Argentines can do to reverse U.S. interference in their country, Mr. Toledo shrugs: “We will continue to raise our voices at events like this and cry, ‘Trump, go home!’”
