Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Argentine President Javier Milei faces mounting protests, the Andean Community seeks to resolve a trade dispute between Colombia and Ecuador, and Guatemala gets a new attorney general.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Argentine President Javier Milei faces mounting protests, the Andean Community seeks to resolve a trade dispute between Colombia and Ecuador, and Guatemala gets a new attorney general.

Argentines Protest Milei’s Austerity Measures

On Tuesday, tens of thousands of Argentines—and perhaps as many as hundreds of thousands, according to one government estimate—demonstrated in Buenos Aires against President Javier Milei’s austerity policies.

More than halfway into Milei’s four-year term, such protests have become relatively frequent. The president’s approval rating fell to around 35 percent last month, according to AtlasIntel. Though some demonstrators on Tuesday carried signs referring to recent corruption accusations against Milei’s chief of staff, their main frustration was over the economy.

On the campaign trail in 2023, Milei was open about the fact that his aggressive policy plans would cause economic disruption. In his inaugural address, he said, “[T]he situation will get worse in the short term,” with consequences for “employment, real wages, and the number of poor and destitute people.”

Those predictions soon came true, but Argentina saw improvements in other metrics that Milei had flagged as key to tackling the root causes of economic dysfunction. Both the inflation rate and deficit dropped. And after shrinking in 2023 and 2024, Argentina’s economy grew 4.4 percent in real terms last year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In October, many Argentines endorsed Milei’s party in midterm elections. However, economic pain has sharpened since then. When adjusted for inflation, average formal sector wages in February had fallen nearly 9 percent below their level in November 2023—the month before Milei took office.

Milei has focused on growing parts of the economy that employ relatively few people—such as mining and oil—while allowing job losses in sectors that became uncompetitive when he stripped........

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