Argentine university professors and students took their classes onto the streets of Buenos Aires on Wednesday to protest President Javier Milei’s veto of a funding increase for cash-strapped public universities.
Literature students from the University of Buenos Aires, the country’s most prestigious school, brought their desks out onto the sidewalk in the center of the city as professors lectured loudly over the din of the traffic.
The protests come a week after Milei vetoed a law approved by the Senate that envisaged regular funding increases for public universities, whose budgets he slashed.
The law also provided for university instructors and other staff to receive pay increases to offset Argentina’s stubbornly high inflation rate.
Annual inflation stood at 209 percent in September.
At the University of Buenos Aires, the faculties of law, medicine, philosophy and arts, economy, science and social science all took their classes outside.
In other faculties, students occupied buildings but allowed classes to take place inside.
Milei, who has imposed harsh austerity measures to try to revive Argentina’s ailing economy, argued the increases, which Congress said represented 0.14 percent of GDP, jeopardized his zero-deficit policy.
On Tuesday he insisted he was committed to Argentina’s cherished model of fee-free public university education and said it was up to parliament to find a way to fund them without upsetting his fiscal surplus.
Milei has also warned that he would not raise taxes nor incur new debt.
University instructors’ unions have called a 24-hour strike on Thursday and a 48-hour strike next week.
Around 80 percent of all Argentines who attend higher-level education enroll in public universities.
Milei, a self-declared “anarcho-capitalist” has described them as hotbeds of Socialist indoctrination.
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