Looting in Argentina: shops defended with gunfire and the Milei factor

Looting in Argentina: armed neighbours and a runaway dollar

In Argentina, some shopkeepers spend the night inside their premises with a shotgun next to the till. Images circulating on social media show business owners defending what they have left with gunfire, while looting continues in several cities and people debate whether the parallel dollar will hit 1,000 pesos per unit. In an election campaign pitting Economy Minister Sergio Massa against the liberal Javier Milei, every ransacked shop becomes a political argument. It is worth separating what is seen, what is attributed and what nobody will put their name to.

What is happening: looting and shops on the defensive

The episodes are repeated in places such as San Nicolás de los Arroyos. In a supermarket in Moreno, in Buenos Aires province, a group entered, attacked the owners and made off with the goods, according to footage that has circulated. Elsewhere, looters load crates of beer into baby strollers, an image that sums up the country rather well: scarcity at heart, nerve on the surface.

Part of the retail sector has reacted by arming itself. It is not a metaphor: some people are sleeping at their businesses with a weapon within reach. Much of the country watches these scenes with a mix of panic and exhaustion, because some remember seeing them in 2019, when similar videos of supermarket raids circulated.

Why is there looting in Argentina?

Because relentless inflation turns any neighbourhood into a powder keg once the spark is lit, and because behind the looting people point to an internal fight within Peronism itself. One current maintains that unions and organised groups are mobilising clientelist networks to create chaos and exert political blackmail. Another reading attributes it to sheer collapse: when social coexistence becomes impossible, people stop putting up with it.

The striking thing is that the government is of the same stripe as those who supposedly stir up the disorder. Hence the question hanging over every analysis: if this happens under a sympathetic administration, what will happen if someone willing to cut spending comes to power.

Salaries of 300 euros, 50% poverty and a dollar slipping away

The macroeconomic picture Argentines themselves paint is bleak: a destroyed productive structure, collapsed productivity and a huge share of employment sustained by money printing. One participant raises the unknown: if the parallel dollar were to reach 1,000 pesos, any adjustment would arrive with the currency in flames.

With salaries comparable to 300 and 400 euros and prices similar to Spain's, half the middle class has disappeared along the way. The figure hovering over the discussion is 50% poverty: from that starting point, any shock plan multiplies the damage before fixing anything. And credit, according to whoever did the calculation, is a chimera: getting a loan above 3,000 dollars in that country would be mission impossible.

Milei: prison for looters and an impossible timetable

The liberal candidate promises harsh sentences for looters, cuts to subsidies and a state reduced to seven or eight ministries. The problem is not the programme, it is the institutional arithmetic. With almost no lawmakers in the Senate, and with Peronism controlling the streets and the territories, governing would be a permanent tug of war.

The most repeated forecast is harsh and comes in several versions: two to four years of brutal adjustment before any results; violent blockade from day one; and an ending that ranges from a helicopter exit to something worse. The underlying thesis is that Milei is what the country needs, but that the forces set to oppose him in a society without a middle class are far more powerful than he is.

From corralito to laboratory: the parallel with Spain

The conversation quickly drifts to the mirror. Argentina has dragged two decades of intermittent crisis, with the 2001 corralito and the expropriation of YPF as milestones on the same road. Some see the country as a laboratory where recipes are tested that are later applied elsewhere, while others warn that Spain, with unbalanced public accounts, is on the same path a decade behind.

It is a convenient comparison and a misleading one at the same time. Convenient because it provides free arguments; misleading because Argentina has spent sixty years in crisis and is still held together with wire, but held together. The only thing that seems certain is that someone is in charge, and it is not always the person signing the decrees.

With looting on the front pages, salaries on the floor and a dollar threatening to break through the 1,000-peso barrier, the question is no longer whether Argentina can hold out until the elections, but who will pay the bill when someone finally decides to put the accounts in order.