With Milei 500 days in office, are Argentines better off?
When walking through the Boedo neighborhood in Argentina's capital Buenos Aires you get to hear entirely different opinions about the country's president Javier Milei. One is marked by optimism, the other comes from people who remain largely skeptic.
Signs of disapproval are hard to miss. At a local store, a poster is hung up reading "No entry" and showing the pictures of President Milei and Security Minister Patricia Bullrich, who are clearly not welcome here.
Yet just around the corner, construction workers hammer and lay bricks on a new apartment building — revealing a new confidence in the future of a country rebuilding itself.
Since taking office as Argentina's president on December 10, 2023, Milei has become one of the world's most talked-about leaders. His radical libertarian stance has earned him fierce criticism from the left, while many economists see him as a reformer liberating Argentina from decades of bureaucracy and rigid controls.
Milei's most recent bold move was ending the so-called "cepo" restrictions — a Spanish term meaning "trap" or "shackles" — which had restricted access to US dollars for over two decades. Introduced in 2003 with the aim of curbing Argentina's runaway inflation, the currency controls were officially lifted in mid-April, allowing individuals and businesses to freely conduct foreign exchange........
© Deutsche Welle
