Argentines taking to the streets to revel in their Copa América triumph inhabit a very different place now than they did 19 months ago, when their World Cup win sent millions surging into the same Buenos Aires square in a howl of collective celebration.

“Glorious,” Diego Cáceres, 38, recalled of Argentina’s massive open-air party on December 18, 2022.

“This is beautiful, too,” he said of Sunday’s crowds cheering and setting off fireworks around the capital’s landmark obelisk after Argentina beat Colombia 1-0 in extra time to win its third straight major tournament Sunday night.

“But it’s a cherry-on-top, or a reminder. It makes me want to go back in time.”

Poverty stricken

Economic crisis has stalked Argentina for years. But today, annual inflation tops 270%. Almost 60% of the country’s 45 million people live in poverty.

Argentines have become worn out by the high-stakes anxiety of the news: Anti-government protests raging, labor strikes paralyzing cities, President Javier Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist,” unveiling new spending cuts. This week their televisions flashed dire warnings about the peso hitting new lows against the dollar, dragging the value of their savings down with it.

The last time Cáceres celebrated his national team in this downtown square, he worked as a cook in various restaurants and rented an apartment. Today, he said, he’s unemployed and sleeps on the streets.

“Everything is horrible now,” he said after the game finally got underway in Miami after repeated delays due to fan congestion.

“Just when you think things can’t get more expensive, they do.”

Crisis after triumph

Some in this superstitious nation joke that they paid a steep price in Qatar for their first World Cup victory since 1986, pointing to the crises that followed the triumph.

“Has anyone checked the terms and conditions of winning the Copa América?” reads one post on X widely shared among Argentines. “I don’t know if I’m up for a second round of winning at any cost.”

But Argentines say that they needed this tournament, and this trophy, more than they could have imagined. For Argentina, South America’s biggest football championship offered not just glorious achievement but exquisite, if fleeting, escape.

“It’s our best entertainment, that’s what makes it so important,” said Erika Maya, a 47-year-old homeless mother of six, as she peered at the televised match through the glass of a locked restaurant door. “You can forget everything that’s going on, and just enjoy.”

Messi-inspired respite

For every new outrage over the last 24 days, Argentines have found the respite of obsessively watching their beloved national team, led by Lionel Messi, play for an hour and a half, generating moments of agony and excitement that reverberate all over this football-crazed country.

“Football is the fruit of our society, it’s what we’re proud of, it’s what we give to the world,” said 21-year-old soldier Fabrizo Diaz, who watched the match with his girlfriend.

As the game kicked off at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium, restaurants in Buenos Aires shuttered, streets emptied and the sprawling city fell eerily silent, with most Argentines in thrall to their TVs at home as though under a COVID lockdown. The looming specter of Messi’s retirement has heightened football fever in recent weeks, with the 37-year-old captain’s noncommittal muses in televised interviews inducing, at turns, nationwide hope and despair.

“I believe Messi is going to continue. I don’t know if he’ll make it to the next World Cup, but this is not the end,” said 32-year-old Adrian Vallejos, watching the final with his wife and son. “I mean, God, I hope so.”

Messi’s persistent leg injuries — including a hurt ankle in the second-half of the final that forced him off the field — have drawn more attention than his performances during this Copa América. But Argentines breathed a sigh of relief when, asked by ESPN this week whether this match would be his last in blue-and-white, Messi refused to rule out playing in the 2026 World Cup.

“We’re at a very poignant transition for this team,” said Alejo Levoratti, a sports sociologist at Argentine research institute CONICET. “It’s only at the point of his retirement that Messi arrived at his best moment and found this connection with his team, this communion with Argentina.”

Another Argentine great of the same age, Ángel Di María, had announced Sunday’s match would be his last, fueling a broader sense of nostalgia about the national squad. He had tears in his eyes as he left the pitch to a standing ovation after Argentina’s breakthrough goal. “I dreamt of retiring like this,” he told reporters afterward.

Successful run

After years of disappointments in international tournaments, the Argentine team has, more recently, clinched triumph after triumph — 2021 Copa América, 2022 inaugural Finalissima match, 2022 World Cup — exhilarating its troubled country again and again.

President Milei, who had a short stint as a goalie for the professional football team Chacarita Juniors, congratulated the national team in an all-caps message on X: “WE ARE CHAMPIONS AGAIN…!!!”

In litter-strewn downtown Buenos Aires, the site of so many protests in recent weeks, national pride appeared, briefly, restored. Friends and strangers draped in Argentinean flags and jerseys hugged and jumped up and down, some singing “Muchachos,” the unofficial anthem of the 2022 World Cup, others chanting Messi’s name.

The fall in activity in March follows year-on-year declines of 3.0% in February and 4.1% in January. File
| Photo Credit: AP

Argentina’s economic activity fell 8.4% in March from a year earlier, the country’s official statistics agency said on May 22, its fifth monthly drop in a row and the steepest fall since 2020.

The result was a steeper drop than the 6.9% fall estimated by market analysts in a Reuters poll, underscoring the impact of libertarian President Javier Milei’s cost-cutting policies since taking office in December. Mr. Milei has embarked on a painful austerity drive to bring down rising poverty and annual inflation near 300%.

Nine sectors recorded declines in the year-on-year comparison, led by construction that posted a 29.9% decline and the manufacturing industry which slipped 19.6%, according to the data published by Argentina’s INDEC statistics agency.

Economic activity numbers are seen as a useful early indicator of likely gross domestic product (GDP) results.

The fall in activity in March follows year-on-year declines of 3.0% in February and 4.1% in January.

In the year through March, Argentina’s economic activity fell 5.3%.

President of Argentina, Javier Milei. File

Argentina’s monthly inflation rate eased sharply to a single-digit rate in April for the first time in half a year, data released Tuesday showed, a closely watched indicator that bolsters President Javier Milei’s severe austerity program aimed at fixing the country’s troubled economy.

Prices rose at a rate of 8.8% last month, the Argentine government statistics agency reported, down from a monthly rate of 11% in March and well below a peak of 25% last December, when Mr. Milei became president with a mission to combat Argentina’s dizzying inflation, among the highest in the world.

“Inflation is being pulverized,” Manuel Adorni, the presidential spokesperson, posted on social media platform X after the announcement. “Its death certificate is being signed.”

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Although praised by the International Monetary Fund and cheered by market watchers, Mr. Milei’s cost-cutting and deregulation campaign has, at least in the short term, squeezed families whose money has plummeted in value while the cost of nearly everything has skyrocketed. Annual inflation, the statistics agency reported Tuesday, climbed slightly to 289.4%.

“People are in pain,” said 23-year-old Augustin Perez, a supermarket worker in the suburbs of Buenos Aires who said his rent had soared by 90% since Mr. Milei deregulated the real estate market and his electricity bill had nearly tripled since the government slashed subsidies. “They say things are getting better, but how? I don’t understand.”

Mr. Milei’s social media feed in recent weeks has become a stream of good economic news: Argentine bonds posting some of the best gains among emerging markets, officials celebrating its first quarterly surplus since 2008 and the IMF announcing Monday it would release another $800 million loan—a symbolic vote of confidence in Mr. Milei’s overhaul.

“The important thing is to score goals now,” Mr. Milei said at an event Tuesday honoring former President Carlos Menem, a divisive figure whose success driving hyperinflation down to single digits through free-market policies Mr. Milei repeatedly references. “We are beating inflation.”

Shrinking economy

Even so, some experts warn that falling inflation isn’t necessarily an economic victory—rather the symptom of a painful recession. The IMF expects Argentina’s gross domestic product to shrink by 2.8% this year.

“You’ve had a massive collapse in private spending, which explains why consumption has dropped dramatically and why inflation is also falling,” said Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who studies emerging markets. “People are worse off than they were before. That leads them to spend less.”

Signs of an economic slowdown are everywhere in Buenos Aires—the lines snaking outside discounted groceries, the empty seats in the city’s typically booming restaurants, the growing strikes and protests.

At an open-air market in the capital’s Liniers neighborhood, Lidia Pacheco makes a beeline for the garbage dump. Several times a week, the 45-year-old mother of four rummages through the pungent pile to salvage the tomatoes with the least mold.

“This place saves me,” Pacheco said. Sky-high prices have forced her to stick to worn-out clothes and shoes and change her diet to the point of giving up yerba mate, Argentina’s ubiquitous national drink. “Whatever I earn from selling clothes goes to eating,” she said.

Mr. Milei, a self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist” and former TV personality, warned his policies would hurt at first.

“It’s not his fault, it’s the Peronists who ruined the country, and Mr. Milei is trying to do his best,” said Rainer Silva, a Venezuelan taxi driver who fled his own country’s economic collapse for Argentina five years ago.