The situation facing chemists and other researchers in Argentina is continuing to worsen under the country’s hard right President Javier Milei, who assumed the country’s helm in December. The sharp cuts to higher education, science budgets and professors’ salaries persist, prompting an estimated 1000 academics to take to the streets on 2 October to protest.
After less than six months in office, Milei had already demoted the country’s science ministry and frozen funding for the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (Conicet), which funds the work of about 12,000 scientists at 300 research institutions. He has also frozen budgets at the country’s public universities that conduct most of the research carried out in the country, at their 2023 levels. And now, less than a year after becoming president, he has drastically reduced funding at public universities, crippling the salaries of professors and staff there.
‘Salaries have lost about 50% of buying capacity while accumulated inflation is about 144% in one year,’ Alberto Kornblihtt, a molecular biologist and emeritus professor at the University of Buenos Aires, tells Chemistry World. The country’s annual inflation rate has been estimated at nearly 300%.
In addition, although Argentina’s Congress approved legislation to regulate the budgets of national universities with adjustments that account for inflation for current expenses, as well as salaries, Milei vetoed the measure on the evening of the 2 October demonstrations. On 9 October, Congress upheld Milei’s veto.
In March, nearly 70 Nobel prize winners from around the world, almost a third of whom won the prize for chemistry, urged Milei to block cuts to the country’s science and technology budgets, warning that Argentina’s future depends on it.
In Buenos Aires alone, about 270,000 students, professors, scientists and members of the public protested on 2 October, and significant demonstrations also took place in other large cities like Córdoba, Rosario and Bariloche, according to Kornblihtt.
‘Milei has declared a war against science, universities, culture, public health,’ Kornblihtt states. He points to a recent declaration of the country’s National Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences, which expresses ‘deep concern’ about ‘the significant reduction of the budget for the areas of science and technology and education’ in the president’s national budget proposal for 2025.
‘We understand that the defunding of these crucial areas threatens the future of our country,’ the declaration reads. ‘Likewise, we regret the dissemination of unfounded disqualifying information about the scientific community and its tasks, as well as about public universities.’
The academy warns that these developments, on top of slashed budgets and the administration’s failure to execute already approved funds, are causing the emigration of prominent scientists.
Exodus underway
Following marches and protests at Argentinian universities back in April, Milei’s government had increased the budget for expenses assigned to the universities to account for inflation, but salaries only received minor growth throughout the year and have lost anywhere from 30% to 50% in real terms, depending on the particular job in question, notes Gerardo Burton, an emeritus chemistry professor at the University of Buenos Aires.
‘Most research [in Argentina] is carried out in public universities and low salaries pushes people out of the system, either leaving the country to work in universities abroad, moving to private universities … or going to industry,’ Burton states. ‘This exodus is already happening and with the added cut in research funds that is already seriously affecting most research projects, it will have a long-lasting deleterious effect in our scientific future,’ he predicts.
Valeria Levi, a chemist and deputy dean of the School of Exact and Natural Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, agrees. ‘The big cuts were in December 2023, when we lost 30% of the salaries and we did not recover from this situation,’ she says. ‘Consequently, many teaching assistants and professors are leaving the public universities to positions with higher salaries or better conditions in the country or in other countries.’
To illustrate the point, Levi notes that the salary of teaching assistants, who likely have the education level of a postdoctoral or independent young researcher, is about $620 (£473) per month and renting an apartment in Buenos Aires costs about $400. ‘This is producing a massive migration of scientists and young teaching assistants to other countries as we have never seen before in a democracy,’ she says.
Meanwhile, media reports confirm that there were millions of dollars contributed by international organisations that Milei’s government could have been spent on approved scientific projects that have been paralysed since December 2023, but apparently a political decision was made not to use those funds. Alicia Caballero, the former president of the National Agency for the Promotion of Research, Technological Development and Innovation that is responsible for scientific funding in Argentina, confirmed these findings publicly and resigned at the beginning of October. ‘We are working with no funds from December 2023, it is a catastrophe,’ Levi tells Chemistry World.