Javier Miley He began his first visit to the region as president last night. He landed in Bariloche and flew by helicopter, despite the strong wind, to the emblematic Llao Llao hotelwhere he will participate in the traditional forum organized by his business leader and religious guide, Eduardo Elsztain.
The capsule in which all the guests at this meeting of the country’s business elite move is airtight. The Llao Llao is the ideal place for this: 25 kilometers from the center of Bariloche, with a single access and on an elevation of land that allows custody by land, air and water, the hotel will not be the first time that it is transformed into strength.
In fact, when the G20 ministers met in 2017, or when, a year before, the then president of the United States Barak Obama visited the hotel, security worked smoothly.
There are protests called with amplification and others with stealth, especially from state unions. But it remains to be seen if, with such certainty, the demonstrations have an effect.
As in most Argentine provinces, in Río Negro the president could hear more than a dozen complaints about the measures he took in these four months of government. In Neuquén, whose coast is a few kilometers in a straight line from Llao Llao, there are also plenty of reproaches.
But Milei did not arrive to make announcements or listen to protests. but to speak to the businessmen who meet every year, since 2012, at this select meeting.
The governors of Neuquén and Río Negro, with different ups and downs and profiles, made public proposals for allocations that were cut in recent months, from the Teacher Incentive Fund, which contributed a part of the salaries in schools, to the transportation subsidy.
Alberto Weretilneck was the toughest. Shortly after the first measures were known, he said that he does not expect anything good from the four years of Milei’s government. Rolando Figueroa, more given to negotiation and sitting on the largest hydrocarbon reserves in the Southern Cone, softened his speech.
The truth is that the trickle of resources for social plans and public works has ended. There are works stopped everywhere you look in both provinces and national routes are destroyed with no recovery plan in sight.
Milei in Bariloche: nothing for fruit growing
The fruit businessmen who traveled to Buenos Aires to complain about what they consider an exchange delay did not receive the answers they expected either.
In addition to cuts to what are called “discretionary shipments,” which the governors noted as safe at the beginning of each year, there is the correlation of the lack of collection of provincial taxes in the federal co-participation.
The recession is to blame for this decline. For Neuquén, which has oil revenue as its main source of income, the blow is not so hard, but Río Negro lives a different reality.
It is that same recession that reduces the collection of Gross Income, the most important tax of the provinces, which taxes the sales of products and services in their territories.
Milei in Bariloche: the tourism crisis
The city that shelters the guests of the forum is experiencing an atypical low season in relation to the last decade. The decline in tourist activity is noticeable as it has not been for a long time and the end of the Pre-Trip has robbed the destination of breaking the records that the influx of visitors has been breaking year after year.
The so-called “young tourism” sector has already raised alarm bells because it finances each year of activity with what it sells for the next two. And, as in other lines of consumption, sales are falling due to the recession.
The president arrives in Bariloche on the eve of what will surely be a massive protest throughout the country: that of the national universities, hit by a fierce cut of resources.
In the region (and especially in Bariloche) there are courses from two large national universities, Comahue and Río Negro..
But in addition to the National University of Cuyo, the undergraduate and graduate courses taught by the Balseiro Institutelocated in the Bariloche Atomic Center, at an intermediate point between the center of Bariloche and the Llao Llao hotel.
Milei in Bariloche: what happens with hydrocarbons
The Neuquén governor confided to several interlocutors that the hydrocarbon chapter of the Omnibus Law (now reduced to the Bases Law) It was written by Neuquén officials.
Vaca Muerta is a national heritage site but it is in the basement of Neuquén and belongs to the province. Without the gas and oil that cannot be extracted, energy imports will not be able to be further reduced, which generates a complicated outflow of dollars.
Beyond the delays in works such as the reversal of the gas pipeline that is needed to export gas to Brazil, there are forecasts that are maintained beyond the change of government, such as the oil port in Río Negro or the export of liquefied natural gas.
The routes that transport sand to support the fractures in the Vaca Muerta formation are crying out for investment. The trucks destroy them without the national State, which is responsible, attending, not only to the expansion of the network, but even to maintenance.
But it is not all the responsibility of this government. The image of half-finished work on Route 22 says it all. Just like the very short stretch that remains to complete the asphalt of Route 23.