Last year, in a post on X, Milei urged people to buy into a cryptocurrency project called $Libra. Investors poured in; the meme coin spiked, then quickly collapsed. There is no suggestion Milei made money from this, but plenty of people lost a lot, and in recent weeks the extent of his relationship with the scheme’s backers has emerged. He has not apologized but has conceded he has “something to learn.” At the same time, his inner circle is rife with feuding, particularly over Karina’s favorite, Adorni, the chief of staff, who is in trouble for bringing his wife on the presidential plane to New York in March and traveling in a private jet to Uruguay, not a good look given Milei’s fixations.
Still, the fundamentals favor the incumbent. “Our camp is in total disarray — for now, there is no alternative to Milei,” Caren Tepp, a congresswoman who ran as a Peronist in the midterms, told me, adding that the task today was to build a broad opposition front. Trump, it seems clear, will back Milei to the hilt. In a world where critical minerals have become what coal and iron were to the industrial revolution, and where oil and gas supplies from the Middle East appear choked, Argentina has the assets Trump seeks in his so-called Donroe Doctrine push to control the hemisphere: oil and gas in abundance, lithium for Teslas and robots and the copper that is the irreplaceable mineral for electrification of vast new A.I. data centers.
Trump appointees made their case forcefully at Argentina Week. Benjamin Black, the chief executive of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, said transforming the Western Hemisphere was impossible without Argentina. The strategic aim, he emphasized, was to catalyze private capital to counter China’s attempt to to gain geopolitical heft in Latin America and elsewhere. Given the challenge, Black said, it was fortunate that Milei is widely seen as “a rock star, a sports hero and a matinee idol rolled into one.”
A week later, I made my way to the lunar landscape north of Jujuy, home to the Argentine lithium boom, where salt flats stretch to the horizon like frozen lakes set against russet-colored mountains. Beyond a pass in northwestern Argentina that rises to over 13,500 feet, in the village of Susques, I saw in the crystalline air the small figure of Luz Vázquez descending from a van in an orange jacket and trundling a suitcase.
Vázquez, who is 30, had come off a week of 12-hour day shifts at the Exar lithium mine and would now have a week at home with her 9-year-old son, who wants to be an astronaut. Then she would return to work with a week of 12-hour night shifts. Her son, she said, does not understand why she has to go away so much.
