Argentina's President Calls For Making The Americas Great Again, From Alaska To Tierra Del Fuego
'I love making you cry. And most people love seeing you cry', President Milei told leftist legislators, who he called 'cockroaches' and 'murderers'.
Argentine President Javier Milei delivered his third March 1 opening speech to his country's national Congress amid shouting, insults, and exchanges with opposition lawmakers. Former speeches have featured such heckling, but for the first time Milei engaged his detractors directly and departed from his prepared text with a combative tone.
“I’ll tell you something, kukas [cockroaches]. I love taming you. I love making you cry. And most people love seeing you cry,” he told Peronist legislators. Kuka is a derogatory term for supporters of former presidents Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Besides, he accused Peronists of corruption and theft, while also calling them troglodytes and “murderers,” in a reference to the still unsolved 2015 death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who had been investigating the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.
Milei also called out businessmen Paolo Rocca and Javier Madanes Quintanilla for high prices and layoffs. “Does anyone really want to continue with an impoverishing model where only corrupt politicians and businesspeople who are friends of the powerful win, at the expense of the well-meaning Argentines?” Milei said. He also highlighted key achievements of his administration, including a “deficit-free” 2026 budget, tax cuts, and a laws allowing no-questions-asked money transfers, lowering of the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 14, labor reforms, and approval of the Mercosur–European Union trade agreement.
Milei heralded 90 “structural reforms,” to be introduced gradually, covering the criminal code, education, and judicial systems, taxes, electoral laws, and political party financing. Other proposals aim to protect private property, remove business regulations, and encourage investment. He also suggested potential constitutional changes to “examine the juridical institutional organization” of Argentina and “build a new architecture” for the government “for the next 50 years, with Western morality as a new state policy.” He proposed a reformed legal framework for natural resource extraction, including copper, lithium, fishing, agriculture, hydrocarbons, and regional products—while avoiding “absurd environmentalist preconceptions.”
He also hinted that Argentina should abandon its traditional neutrality in conflicts, citing support for Israel and Ukraine. He called for stronger armed forces. “We have to build the century of the Americas. Make America Great Again, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego,” the president said.