Argentina’s neoliberal rollback targets Perón-era social tourism as privatisation dismantles collective welfare infrastructure
Original framing: “Milei to privatise Argentina’s $10-a-night workers’ hotels” — Financial Times
The privatisation of social tourism complexes echoes earlier neoliberal rollbacks of welfare states in Latin America, such as Chile’s 1980s privatisation of *CORFO* assets or Mexico’s dismantling of *INFONAVIT* under Salinas. Perón’s 1940s–50s social tourism program was part of a broader welfare state that redistributed wealth to the working class, a model later dismantled by military dictatorships and neoliberal reforms. The current policy also parallels the 1990s privatisation of Argentina’s state-owned oil company *YPF*, which led to energy poverty and regional inequality.
The privatisation of Argentina’s social tourism complexes is not merely an economic policy but a structural assault on the welfare state’s redistributive legacy, with roots in Perón’s 1940s–50s social contracts and their later dismantling by neoliberal regimes.
The Financial Times’ framing obscures the class and racial dimensions of this policy, which disproportionately harms working-class, indigenous, and rural communities—groups that were historically marginalised by elite tourism networks. Indigenous perspectives reveal how these complexes were spaces of cultural integration, while cooperative models offer a pathway to reclaim them as tools for collective welfare. The trickster’s lens exposes the absurdity of framing social tourism as 'inefficient,' when its privatisation serves the same elites who once derided it as 'populist waste.' Solutions must therefore combine legal protections (heritage designation), economic redistribution (progressive taxation), and community ownership (cooperatives) to reverse the damage and restore these spaces as pillars of social cohesion.