Yeah it’s looking bad. Not only the provincial governments suffered tremendous cuts to their personnel, but at the same time milei is actively undermining them by retaining automatic transfers of funds from the central government to the provincial governments, known as the Federal Co-Participation scheme, which is constitutional. These funds come from some national taxes that we all pay.

In my view, this retention of funds serves two purposes: First it gives milei a powerful tool to force governors to follow him or at the very least present as little resistence as possible. Let us remember now that milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, has very limited political power despite being in the Executive power. They don’t have a majority in either upper or lower chambers, they depend almost exclusively on support from PRO (standard neolibs) and UCR (“socdem” neolibs) if they want to pass on any project. They also have a grand total of zero provincial governors of their own, meaning that here they rely exclusively on support from PRO-aligned provincial governors and others like-minded individuals. So, by retaining funds he might be able to force some governors to do X or Y thing like support his ridiculous law packages, or directly undermine rival governors like the peronist Axel Kicillof, governor of Buenos Aires (except the Federal Capital, this is a different entity).

Second, it serves as a mere propaganda tool. He insisted over and over again during his campaign about balancing the budget, the never-ending quest to reach “deficit zero”, which means cutting down pretty much every public spending from public works to all social assistance programs. The Federal Co-participation scheme is yet another thing that “creates deficit”.

In the case of Misiones the province is starved of funds like pretty much all others. The common thing governments do here is release some funds, pay the pigs and counterattack against the other protests. But we don’t have a “common” government anymore, so it’s all in the fucking air lmao.