Water for Sale: Argentina’s Milei Pushes Massive Privatization of Essential Services
Posted by polymute@reddit | anime_titties | View on Reddit | 87 comments
mrgoobster@reddit
There was already an infrastructure investment deficit in Argentina before Milei's austerity regime, and its only gotten worse under his administration. Some of the apparent success of austerity has come about due to cut projects, including by AySA.
If I had to guess at the reasoning behind this: Milei's administration has realized that they ratfucked the long-term infrastructure outcomes for short-term fiscal credibility, and now they're trying to shift the public outrage that will inevitably occur once the public realizes that essential services were f-ed with.
So they'll create a private monopoly, the citizens will get bilked, the long-term lack of infrastructure investment will result in a decrease in service quality, the government will bail out the monopoly, and the rich will get richer while the poor get poorer and services worsen.
Gomeria@reddit
water trated by AySA is already non-drinkable.
i would rather pay 20 bucks of water services and have drinkable water. than pay 5 and have to buy 5 20L canisters of water to have drinking water in my house a month for the whole total of 25 bucks
General_High_Ground@reddit
Argentina has 46+ million people and considering that those people are paying taxes, government definitely has enough money to fix the problem, especially for something as essential as drinkable water. They are just too corrupt to do so.
Gomeria@reddit
here, in my country, u cant even fire federal workers, its ilegal to do so. Thats how much of a corrupt country the lefties leaved behind
imselfinnit@reddit
It's the same old tactic. Totally predictable.
rattleandhum@reddit
He should ask the UK how that went -- increased pollution of bodies of water in protected areas, swereage spilled into the sea, crumbling infrastructure and divident payouts for shareholders.
You can't privatise a monopoly -- water, rail, etc. All of these are essential to the running of your country and the prosperity of your people. No private company is incentivised to provide better service to your population when there is no competition or a potential loss of business for misdeeds.
Absolute insanity, but I expect nothing less from that chainsaw weilding lunatic.
the_pwnererXx@reddit
Japan has great privitized rail
rattleandhum@reddit
JR is still government run. It's split by region and there are smaller regional operators, but the main network is under one umbrella, unlike the UK where it was split into several operators -- and split further among those who rented the rolling stock and those who controlled the lines. It was a fucking mess, which is why it's getting renationalised.
Ilikeporkpie117@reddit
Sewerage going into the rivers and sea was happening long before the privatisation of the water industry. It's disingenuous to claim it wasn't happening when everything was nationalised.
HireEddieJordan@reddit
Sewage entering waterways vs deliberately dumping untreated waste to cut costs.
It's disingenuous to argue that this is the same thing.
Southern Water discharged enormous volumes of raw sewage into protected coastal waters for nearly six years causing “very considerable environmental damage” because it was cheaper than treating it, a court has heard.
voidox@reddit
well, can't expect much else but disingenuous talking points by capitalist worshipers like that dude who keep crying about the left daring to want progressive policies that help people and not corpos/rich.
GianfrancoZoey@reddit
It's not insane tbf. It's insane for the people supporting him, but he knows full well how this ends for him and those he represents. They make a shedload of money
TruthHistorical7515@reddit
They voted for this, let them get what they deserve.
MisterBlackStar@reddit
Yeah, it's pretty shitty for the non-retarded half of the population who didn't vote for him tho.
Southern-Chain-6485@reddit
"But wait, I don't want this! I voted for him so he'd do what I wanted him to do, not what he'd said he'd do!" Milei voters, somewhere.
Southern-Chain-6485@reddit
"But wait, I don't want this! I voted for him so he'd do what I wanted him to do, not what he'd said he'd do!" Milei voters, somewhere.
buadach2@reddit
That’s why I couldn’t get my head around all of those that voted conservative 30 years ago in the UK and we are still suffering from that insanity and I’m afraid all the useful idiots will vote Reform and make it even worse.
adamtheskill@reddit
Yeah the fundamental issue is that the incentives just don't match up. Utilities exist because reliable access to electricity, clean water and transportation massively boost an economies output (incidentally they improve our qol but that's just a happy side effect). Private companies exist because capitalism has proven to be the best way to generate wealth. But we don't want to directly profit off of infrastructure we just want it to be as reliable as possible.
A single failure in any utility causes more economic damage than any kind of savings privatisation can offer.
MilkFew2273@reddit
Smells like communism /s
Illustrious-Sky-4631@reddit
Still find this as the most ironic part of the whole thing
Because his campaign used a fictional chainsaw user character as the mascot for their campaign
Said character >!caused a literally apocalypse and give all mankind a fate WAY worse than Death because he was that much of a dumbass pretending to be a smartass SuperHero!<
soulsteela@reddit
It’s an Absolute SHITSHOW, literally, thousands of gallons of shit pumped into the rivers n seas AFTER they borrowed £8 billion leveraged against the business for infrastructure construction, gave every fucking penny to themselves! Thieving bastards!
Apathetic_Zealot@reddit
They know how it ends. Sell public assets, asset degrades to increase profits, government then bails out asset.
councilmember@reddit
Hence govt owns asset again. They must not forget that crucial step!
forkkind2@reddit
Yeap get small boom now and people will point to the graph and shout surplus! In the next 10-20 years people will wonder where the cost of living crisis is coming from as these private companies see a human right as profit
weltvonalex@reddit
Win win win for him and his criminal friends. The rest gets piss water.
Lifekraft@reddit
Oh you totally can. This is dumb and punishing the most vulnerable but it isnt something ultraliberalist care. The market is king.
YourFuture2000@reddit
They expect private property to proft with the cleaning and maintenance of it all.
JLZ13@reddit
People in the comments are missing the point.
It's not about better or worse services. It goes beyond that.
Before milei, AYSA, the company in question, needed almost 1 billion dollars from the government to operate.
Milei reduce the deficit to 26 millions.
The company was used and will be used as political leverage. And be a burden to tax payers.
The company clearly can be efficient. But never under the estate control.
IlluminatedPickle@reddit
You know if you cut the government entirely the deficit goes to 0 million? It's still a fucking stupid idea.
JLZ13@reddit
?
You truly underestimate Argentina's problem.
IlluminatedPickle@reddit
No no no, you like cuts right? So cut the lot, and then you win right? Everyone knows the way you get back into the green is to piss away everything you own for cents on the dollar. You definitely don't invest money in anything, because that would be bad right? Spending money is evil!
JLZ13@reddit
Why are you so mad? I can understand you dislike Milei.
But he's what Argentina needs, people voted for him while promising 0 deficit and won again in November.
IlluminatedPickle@reddit
I'm not mad, I'm amused at the idiocy of people who still support that chode. In any functional society, he'd be getting treated at an involuntary inpatient facility.
JLZ13@reddit
I support him. Everything it's going better than the most optimistic voter in 2023 expected.
If you go back to the end of 2023, and ask what are the most troublesome things in Argentina people woul have say:
Inflation
Dollar exchange rate
LELIQS
Security
Of course there were tons of other problems, but basically those are the main ones. All improved under Milei.
TheWitchWhoLovesCats@reddit
Idk dude, my current issues still are
Inflation
Dollar exchange rate
And now I have to worry about water getting poisoned too
IlluminatedPickle@reddit
No? Really?!?!? I am shook.
"If I keep loudly announcing things are reality, maybe reality will change!"
JLZ13@reddit
So basically not willing to check any of your preconceived opinions.
No need for more discussion. Love you 🥰, bye.
IlluminatedPickle@reddit
You've provided literally no proof of any claims you've made buddy. I don't tend to take people at their word who openly admit to supporting lunatics.
voidox@reddit
lol no reply by him when asked for any proof of his "it's going better than expected" claim.
jenny_905@reddit
Your country will not survive Thatcherism.
You've seen the blueprint, you know what happens.
JLZ13@reddit
You are crazy if you think that thatcher did more harm in the UK than Peronism in Argentina.
Are you aware of any of economic performance of arge before milei?
SilkTouchm@reddit
IlluminatedPickle@reddit
And?
SilkTouchm@reddit
A guy from a dysfunctional, bloated state advocates for other countries to be bloated. What a surprise!
IlluminatedPickle@reddit
That is a very hilarious statement for an Argentinean. In fact, I read that comment out to an Argentine friend of mine. He laughed for a good minute.
So kudos for that, he enjoyed it.
IlluminatedPickle@reddit
Dysfunctional lmao. Enjoy your failed state buddy, you're only accelerating yourself towards it.
_Kiith_Naabal_@reddit
Didn't Milei raised the water tariffs by almost in 400%, making AYSA generate surplus? And now that is it profitable, Milei is liquidating it?
And by how much is he liquidating it anyway? 500 million USD. That will probably be paid by the same money Argentina had to pay in fines to when they ditched that last company that bought the previous one and left Argentina drinking raw sewage
JLZ13@reddit
Milei is not increasing prices. He is eliminating subsidies.
Basically companies, estate own or not, get the full price of the services.... User pay an subsidized price.
The issue is not the amount of money, but the delay in payments. Usually the government doesn't pay in time and the debt to the companies increase.
By eliminating subsidies, companies don't have to wait.
?
_Kiith_Naabal_@reddit
Search how much Milei is selling AYSA for and how much Argentina had to pay to, what is now Veolia, when they nationalized AYSA in 2015. Now connect the dots. If Veolia wins the bid... And they will
JLZ13@reddit
So you are saying Argentina should keep AYSA just for Veolia not to win?
AYSA should be privatize to avoid people paying for its political inefficiencies.
IlluminatedPickle@reddit
"Fixing a problem? No no no, we'll sell the problem and our kids can deal with the fallout for years and years and years."
nhzz@reddit
my great grandparents voted for peronism ONCE, now here we are.
AySAs water smells like straight bleach, only use it to do the dishes.
IlluminatedPickle@reddit
Lmao.
So a litre of water doesn't cost more than it used to?
Private_HughMan@reddit
EVERY FUCKING TIME. He will let his people die of thirst and famine for a few pesos. They'll sell it for data centres and cash crop farmers who sell the crops almost exclusively to foreign nations and leave nothing for the people. Their rivers will be poisoned. Their ground will be poisoned. They flesh and blood will be poisoned. That's how this song and dance always plays out.
Gomeria@reddit
they spouted the same nonsense you are doing for the mining industry and we have mineral deposits that arent worked because people fear out of fake fearmongering of dumdums like you.
the cities near those deposits live in absolute poverty since there's no other activities on the mountains
Private_HughMan@reddit
Oh no! Now you can't poison people for money! I'm so sorry! Can I offer you some pesos to make up for it? Or is it the poisoned children that you want?
Gomeria@reddit
Poisoning how? yeah sure buddy, u are living in first world, never had hunger and make in 1 hour what most people do in 8 hours of work here.
but yeah lets really take care of those glaciers for when the US needs them clean and pretty, lmao.
the olives production nearby are way more toxic than the mining industry.
Private_HughMan@reddit
The chemicals used to refine those minerals and separate them from rock is extremely toxic. The companies that refine those minerals just dump the sludge into nearby bodies of water or let them leech into the ground, which contaminates the ground water. This is the water the people drink and use to cook their food, wash themselves and grow their crops.
https://phys.org/news/2026-04-critical-materials-sacrifice-zones-health.html
Babies shouldn't get cancer.
That is 100% not true. Unless the olives you grow are balls of pure arsenic and you dump them all into the nearby lake and then throw all your babies into that lake to swim, that's not true.
The non-arsenic olives growing there won't grow with poisoned water.
The exploitation of your natural resources without regard for the lives of the people who live there is exactly how the first world kept the third world down. You are begging for more of the torture the first world gave you.
razekery@reddit
Well well well
Private_HughMan@reddit
Three wells. All dry.
weltvonalex@reddit
As long as he and his friends have Fiji water, it's all filed under "fuck the poor"
notapoliticalalt@reddit
Some Milei supporters like to point out how a variety of metrics are better now and that means he’s a success. The problem often is though that you can’t truly measure the impact of these things for decades. And once you do, moving back in the opposite direction is very difficult especially since you’ve given a private operator an extraordinary amount of leverage over you.
bighak@reddit
Argentina had a completely fucked up governing culture of repeatedly overspending to the point of bankruptcy. Milei made things better by stopping the wild overspending. When you look at the specifics however it shows that he is insane. Argentina has hopelessly disfunctional politicians.
disignore@reddit
do you have facts behind that stopping overspending claim? it is not that i wan to refute you, i do really want those facts
Gomeria@reddit
yeah, check the USD balance per year.
MilkFew2273@reddit
You can cure a patient of any ailment by killing him
bigpowerass@reddit
One can reasonably say that Argentina is going through some shit now but while the jury is out on the long term impacts, we already know the long term impacts of Peronism.
notapoliticalalt@reddit
I’m not saying change wasn’t needed, but doing things like this is unlikely to end the way its proponents hope and certainly what they promise. But these kind of privatization schemes across the world don’t have great track records.
bigpowerass@reddit
I think it depends on what’s being privatized. Right now water is subsidized and is sold below cost. The government can’t afford this subsidy anymore, and has not invested in new infrastructure in decades. which is now falling apart. The infrastructure investment needs to happen, the government doesn’t have the money to do it, and they are basically mortgaging 30 years of future water revenues to get somebody else to pay for the infrastructure improvements because they can’t borrow money directly anymore due to a history of not paying it back.
Southern-Chain-6485@reddit
What's this infraestructure that's falling apart? Can you name it?
bigpowerass@reddit
Yeah, here’s one example where people are dying of arsenic poisoning from the tap water.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/nov/27/argentina-hidden-arsenic-crisis-poor-contaminated-water-illness-family-die-children
In case you think this is just a rural/urban divide thing:
https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/amp/argentina/study-finds-widespread-arsenic-contamination-in-buenos-aires-province.phtml
Southern-Chain-6485@reddit
Arsenic comes naturally from some parts of the Andes, it's not artificial pollution. Obviously, it should be filtered. But it's not related to AYSA, the company to be privatized, because AYSA serves the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, where there is no arsenic in the water (there is, of course, the pollution of the entire River Plate basin, but that's another matter, and it's currently well managed)
moonlandings@reddit
It’s always a question of if the incentives are right in the private sector. Frequently the answer is no. If it’s more profitable, and the penalties are relatively light, to not steward the public good appropriately and simply burn through it for cash, that is what the private sector will do 100% of the time. I don’t know Argentina well enough to speculate, but I doubt the incentive structure is such that the bad actors will lose much if anything from poisoning the well in a literal sense.
bigpowerass@reddit
Argentina is a hot investment market because of its relatively weak institutions. I would not bet for a moment that this wouldn’t be worse than an Argentine government with the ability to borrow money and state capacity to build.
Unfortunately they can’t borrow money and the government has been mindblowingly corrupt for a century now. I’m not sure that selling off a water concession is worse than doing nothing at all. I look at it as an opportunity for Argentina to build state regulatory capacity and get a working water system in 30 years. Also, Argentina has one of the highest per capita water usage rates on earth. At some point water needs to be priced appropriately so it stops being wasted to such an extent.
UNisopod@reddit
When leaving the frying pan, one should try to avoid landing in the fire
IlluminatedPickle@reddit
Instructions unclear, burnt my balls.
UNisopod@reddit
Isn't that always the way...
IlluminatedPickle@reddit
I'm never nimble or quick. Fucking candlesticks.
jenny_905@reddit
lol
see England for an example of water privatisation, it's a complete shitshow and the prevailing consensus - amongst those who have to suffer it, the customer - is that no other country on the planet has done this for good reason. Of course the shareholder politicians are very much in favour of it.
IlluminatedPickle@reddit
"no no no, cuts are good! that's why his numbers are so good!" - Internet idiots who think Milei isn't a lunatic given a mandate.
Argentina is probably going to spend the rest of this century undoing the huge amount of damage being wrought upon the fabric of their society by this crazed dog cloning weirdo.
Levitz@reddit
Given the state of the country, a century of undoing damage would mean Milei has changed nothing lmao
jstrong546@reddit
Rentier capitalism at work.
We see similar things happening in the US. My home state is about to sell its electric grid to a private equity firm. These sorts of things usually do not end well. They tell you a nice story about how this is a good thing and how it will make everyone’s life better, and then 5-10 years later you end up with services that are more expensive and less functional. It’s just more consolidation of resources by the ultra wealthy. Why invent or innovate when you can make a fortune charging people to just exist?
sholeyheeit@reddit
Anyone here watch "También la lluvia"? For those who haven't, it's about what happened when this was tried in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Coincidentally, the person who introduced the film to me happens to be Argentinian.
bachh2@reddit
I guess this explained why the US sent them 40b.
It's basically paying for Milei to privatised public services. Well, kudo to the Argentine, you guys are gonna need it.
JLZ13@reddit
That money was paid back... I think in February
Zipz@reddit
And it was only a credit swap around 2.5 billion
BoneZone05@reddit
What a mistake that would be!!! I really hope for their sake they do not go through with it.
Ya want fraud, and bad services? Privatize it