Javier Milei to privatise Argentina’s $10-a-night workers’ hotels

{"text":[[{"start":8.55,"text":"A state-owned complex of beachfront hotels where Argentine workers once stayed for about $10 a night is on the verge of being transferred to the private sector by Javier Milei’s libertarian government, heralding the end of an era of Peronist “social tourism”."}],[{"start":23.15,"text":"Built in the late 1940s under former president Juan Domingo Perón and his charismatic wife Eva Perón (known as Evita), Chapadmalal’s nine hotels embodied the movement’s core principle of guaranteeing workers’ rights, including to holidays."}],[{"start":37.75,"text":"Until recently, Argentines could spend a week there, with full room and board, for subsidised prices that sometimes went as low as $3 or $4 a night. "}],[{"start":46.7,"text":"Up to 5,000 guests spent days on the windswept beach, swam in the Atlantic, ate dinner served by sharply dressed waiters and danced at parties on the hotel terraces, where staff would drag speakers out to play Argentine folk music and lively percussive cumbia. "}],[{"start":63.85,"text":"“People who spent their days working fields came here and felt, ‘Yes I deserve this.’ Kids left with hope that life could be good,” said Cintia Suárez, 43, who has worked at Chapadmalal for 20 years and manages its Eva Perón museum."}],[{"start":78.3,"text":"“You can’t underestimate the cultural value . . . what it means for people to have a right to leisure time,” she said. “There’s no justification for taking that away.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":"

• Cintia Suárez stands with hands in her pockets at the Eva Perón Museum, museum displays and portraits visible behind her.
• Manuel Díez stands by the shoreline, wearing a red zip-up sweater and looking into the distance.

"}],[{"start":88.05,"text":"But the Peronist vision behind Chapadmalal is out of fashion in modern Argentina, where right-wing President Javier Milei says shrinking the sprawling state is crucial to ending chronic economic crises. His government kept the complex closed during its most recent season, which ended in April."}],[{"start":107.25,"text":"Milei last year scrapped a legal requirement for the government to provide so-called “social tourism”, and this March officials announced a tender for a 30-year private concession of Chapadmalal, which cannot be sold because of the terms through which the land was acquired in the 1940s. Argentina’s other state-run complex of seven lakeside hotels in Córdoba will be sold. "}],[{"start":129.7,"text":"The president says state-run social tourism, which had a budget of roughly $7mn as his government ran down operations in 2024, is incompatible with his free-market vision for Argentina. The libertarian economist has been unwinding other aspects of the big-state Peronist model, such as rigid industrial protections and labour regulations."}],[{"start":151.2,"text":"“It makes no sense for the state to manage a complex activity in which it has no competitive advantage or experience,” deregulation minister Federico Sturzenegger said of the hotels last year, predicting a private operator would “enhance their tourism value”."}],[{"start":167.04999999999998,"text":"Peronists argue Milei is destroying a model that has made Argentina one of the most egalitarian countries in Latin America — if also one of the most economically unstable."}],[{"start":177.1,"text":"“Now we have a country where only a few people can do well and a lot of people are doing very badly,” said Manuel Diez, 73, a retired regional union leader and former maintenance worker at the hotel complex. “What’s happening to Chapadmalal represents the people in that sense.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":195,"text":"Argentines are divided over their country’s political direction. About a third of people identify as Peronist or Kirchnerist — supporters of recent Peronist president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her late husband. But the movement is struggling to recover from its landslide defeat to Milei in 2023 and has yet to identify a candidate capable of challenging him in 2027."}],[{"start":220.55,"text":"The libertarian Milei has seen his support slide in recent months as major employers in manufacturing, retail and construction shed jobs and real wages fell slightly. Analysts say the pain is testing Argentines’ patience with the president’s austerity."}],[{"start":237.15,"text":"“The question people are asking now is not, ‘should we have Peronist-style social tourism?’ but ‘does Milei’s model allow me a good enough quality of life that I can go on holiday once in a while?’” said Marcelo García, Americas director at consultancy Horizon Engage. “That should be concerning for the government.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":"

• Bust of Eva Perón on a brick pedestal in front of a chapel with a clock tower at the Chapadmalal Tourist Complex.
• Museum interior with wooden walls, vintage office equipment, framed photographs, and a large portrait of Eva Perón smiling.

"}],[{"start":256.6,"text":"Chapadmalal sits 30km from the city of Mar del Plata, Argentina’s beach tourism hub. The vast complex has restaurants, a medical centre, a chapel, a cinema and five theatres. Staff said Argentines from poorer landlocked regions often saw the ocean for the first time during their visits."}],[{"start":276.20000000000005,"text":"“People would find their way down to the beach right after checking in,” said Hugo Barbero, a lifeguard at the hotel since 2007, recalling one woman in her fifties who approached the water on a particularly cold day. “She opened her arms wide to embrace it, her eyes filled with tears.”"}],[{"start":293.65000000000003,"text":"Evita, the much-beloved first lady who died in 1952 before the final hotels were opened, is memorialised everywhere, including on clocks adorning the hotel buses that mark the hour of her death."}],[{"start":305.85,"text":"As well as the state-owned Chapadmalal and its sister complex Embalse in Córdoba, Argentina’s powerful labour unions also run several hundred tourism complexes for their members."}],[{"start":316.90000000000003,"text":"While other countries including Spain, France and Brazil offer subsidised tourism schemes for state employees and low-income groups, few have state-run facilities comparable in scale to Chapadmalal, bar some former Soviet states that retain 20th-century public spa hotels."}],[{"start":336.00000000000006,"text":"Yet Chapadmalal’s visitor numbers had fallen in recent decades from their 20th-century peak, as governments underinvested in maintenance and right-wing leaders subsidised fewer trips. Several hotels fell into disrepair. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

• Chapadmalal Tourist Complex buildings with red roofs near the coastline, surrounded by grassy fields and a small beach.
• A large, weathered building with peeling paint and boarded windows, identified as a former children’s hotel, stands under a clear blue sky.

"}],[{"start":350.05000000000007,"text":"The most recent Peronist government from 2019 to 2023 invested several million dollars in renovations and visitor numbers rebounded in the years before Milei’s election."}],[{"start":362.45000000000005,"text":"The government this month dismissed Chapadmalal’s roughly 50 remaining employees. Former staff and community groups are holding protests while unions have taken legal action to try to block staff evictions."}],[{"start":375.50000000000006,"text":"“We won’t give up this place that means so much to us,” said María Eva Belza, head of a local community centre and a former teacher who once brought Buenos Aires children on school trips to Chapadmalal. "}],[{"start":387.1000000000001,"text":"The Peronist government of Buenos Aires province has requested Milei allow them to manage the hotels but has received “no response”, said provincial tourism secretary Sole Martínez. Governor Axel Kicillof is Peronism’s most senior elected official and Milei’s bitter political rival. "}],[{"start":405.6000000000001,"text":"Martínez argued “massive business interests” had contributed to the plan to privatise the beachfront properties after the wider town of Chapadmalal underwent a private sector tourism boom in recent years."}],[{"start":417.55000000000007,"text":"An official at the state property agency which now controls Chapadmalal said he was not aware of the province’s request. A date had not been set for the tender process and it was “not yet defined” if private operators would run the hotels as budget or premium facilities, he added."}],[{"start":434.6500000000001,"text":"Argentina’s tourism secretariat declined to comment."}],[{"start":438.30000000000007,"text":"Repeat Chapadmalal guest Gustavo Casais, a 31-year-old street performer in Buenos Aires who is taking evening classes for his high school diploma, said he worried the concession would make the hotels unaffordable on his meagre earnings."}],[{"start":452.6000000000001,"text":"“If privatisation is meant to just make the hotel better, then fine, but if it means the prices will be impossible for ordinary people, that’s terrible,” he said. “Chapadmalal has to be for the people.”"}],[{"start":471.80000000000007,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1780043627_1650.mp3"}