Six stories - 13 March 2025

Hitting the "pay attention" button on Argentina's protests; A grenade attack in Bogota; Honduras's election mess; And Bolivia's economy is spiraling.

Happy Thursday. I focus on US-LatAm relations on Mondays and then use the Thursday newsletter to highlight stories that aren’t directly about the US.

For today, I made the first post about Argentina available to everyone without a paywall. It’s a major challenge for the Milei government. The rest is for paying subscribers. If you work for an organization that needs additional Latin America content and analysis, please consider paying to subscribe.

In today’s newsletter:

1. Argentina protests

2. Honduras primary election results

3. Bogota grenade attack

4. Venezuela’s gold mining hits Angel Falls

5. Bolivia’s economy gets weird

6. Link to yesterday’s webinar recording

Feel free to respond to this email with feedback, comments, and questions.

Let me lead with the detail that everyone cares about: Fans of Boca Junior and River Plate united to defend the senior citizens protesting over pensions at Argentina’s Congress yesterday. It’s not just a fun detail for international media to fawn over. It matters for Milei.

When soccer club fans get political in Latin America, it escalates the tensions and potential for violence. The police responded with far greater force than they have during other recent protests. Over 150 people were arrested and about two dozen protesters were injured, some quite seriously. Videos of the police brutality, including the beating of an 87-year-old man with a police baton and the journalist who was shot in the head at close range with a tear gas canister, led to mass cacerolazos in Buenos Aires yesterday evening.

Those who were detained will be banned from attending games in the near future. That’s part of the security protocols that Argentina uses to keep their sporting events safe, and it is supposed to deter these fan clubs from engaging in acts of organized protest and violence. If these sorts of protests happen again, with multiple clubs sending fans out to engage in protests, the violence could turn even worse.

Milei’s chief of staff says the protests are a form of a coup attempt and Security Minister Patricia Bullrich blames the Kirchners. That’s absurd but also understates the problem. While some elements of Peronism were behind the previous protests, they did not organize yesterday’s events, nor did they cause police to overreact. Soccer fan clubs entering the political fray is arguably a bigger problem for Milei than if it was the Kirchners behind the protests.

President Javier Milei is hitting the limits of his decree authority and needs Congress’s help to demonstrate to the IMF how serious Argentina is about reforms. He’s struggling for plenty of reasons including his own personal crypto scandal. Senior citizens are angry about the budget cuts that have particularly hit pensions. Pensions are a political third rail in every country for good reason. Now there are organized youth protesters backing up the pensioners. And police brutality is always an escalatory factor for protests in a democracy.

This post is Boz hitting the big red “Pay Attention” button for this issue. Up until yesterday, the protests were not a risk for Milei. The factors that aligned to escalate yesterday’s protests mean this issue should now be on everyone’s list of things to monitor.

On one hand, the Honduras primary delivered clear results with Rixi Moncada, Nasry Asfura, and Salvador Nasralla very clearly leading the counts for the Libre, National, and Liberal Parties. We now know who the presidential candidates will be in November’s election.

On the other hand, what a mess of an election.