Students, professors, academics, and staff from public universities all across Argentina will march on Wednesday protesting government budget cuts. The nation-wide march, the second since President Javier Milei came into office in December 2023, is set to take place against the backdrop of the president’s vow to veto a funding increase bill recently approved by Congress.
The largest protest will take place in Buenos Aires Wednesday afternoon in the square in front of Congress. Protesters are set to begin gathering in nearby streets around 2 p.m. and will converge around the main stage at 5, the official starting time of the rally.
The protest will disrupt normal traffic for a few hours. Callao and Entre Ríos avenues will be shut down from 2 to 7 p.m. for protesters to march there, starting at Viamonte and Chile respectively. The area surrounding Congress — from Viamonte to Chile and Rincón/Junín and San José/Uruguay — will also be affected. The BA City Security Ministry recommended avoiding the area while the protest lasts.
The march was called on September 24 by the National Inter-University Council (CIN, by its Spanish initials), the Argentine University Federation and unions grouping professors and university staff. It follows the massive April 23 march, in which the public university community protested Milei’s budget cuts and demanded a salary increase for professors and staff.
During a press conference announcing the march, CIN president Víctor Moriñigo said they intended to carry out a “peaceful, federal and plural protest so that the government understands that defunding universities is a loss for the entire society.”
While Wednesday’s march is largely based on the same reasons as the April protest, President Milei’s vow to veto a law granting funding for universities has added an additional motive for university members.
In mid-September, Argentina’s Senate passed legislation securing all university personnel bimonthly raises based on inflation. Less than 24 hours later, President Javier Milei said he would block it on the grounds that it goes against his primary goal of balancing Argentina’s books.
The president has not formally issued the veto yet but has continuned bashing members of the educational and scientific community.
During a speech at a far-right event in Buenos Aires, he accused scientists and intellectuals of acting like “superior beings” who want the state to “subsidize their profession.”
In a communiqué released after announcing the march, the CIN said that the situation was even more critical than it was at the start of the year, especially mentioning the low salaries professors receive.
“It is inadmissible and deeply unfair that those with the responsibility to educate future professionals […] are currently the ones with the worst salaries,” the organization said, adding that the monthly pay of over 70% of public university professors is under the poverty line.
The CIN also defended the bill that aims to increase funding, and expressed worry about the 2025 budget proposal the government recently filed in Congress. “Never before have the funds demanded by the CIN been so far apart from what the government is proposing in Congress. It is clear that this is not a resource problem, but a matter of priorities.”
The government has shown concern over the march and its potential effects. On Tuesday, the Human Capital Ministry — the entity in charge of managing education issues — released a statement saying that the government “has never defunded public university education” and actually supports it.
“The government’s commitment to public universities stands, we simply demanded clarity in the management of the resources we transferred to them,” the statement said, referring to the 270% increase only applied to basic running costs they approved in May after several meetings with the CIN and the April march. “Everything they asked for, we have given it to them.”
The ministry also mentioned that on Monday they will hold pay negotiations with unions, after the latter rejected the government’s latest proposal on the grounds that it is far from the raise they demand. “This ministry emphatically rejects that the marches and strikes respond to a true need for education funding,” the statement added. “The march is political.”
Protesters will also address the critical situation of Argentine scientific research, as national agency Agencia I+D+i — the main public agency that funds research teams — announced in August that they won’t assign new grants in 2024, and hasn’t paid prior commitments during this year.
However, Alicia Caballero, the person that had made that announcement, resigned to her position as president of the agency on Monday. A spokesperson for the Innovation, Science and Technology Secretariat told the Herald they will assign those grants and make the payments soon, after finishing an audit work.