Buenos Aires, Argentina

In March 2025, I was renting a room off Talcahuano Street in downtown Buenos Aires. My neighbourhood was filled with second-hand music shops and gold-and-ore shops, and all my friends here said that it was the seedy part of the city – that I should have gone to Palermo or Recoleta or San Telmo instead – but I liked being here, where the architecture and the businesses and family lines largely remained unchanged. I liked being here, where I could set off on foot in any direction and not run out of city to see.

Every night after dinner, I’d go for long walks that mostly ended at Plaza del Congreso, a public green space with paths that lead right up to Argentina’s official Congress building. On Tuesdays, there was a group tango lesson that I liked to watch, where all the dancers were senior citizens.

It was impressive. Good tango is an intentional connection – upper body to footwork, taut stance to manoeuvrability, dancer to partner. The older dancers had the agility, posture, and strength to stalk and glide across the floor, holding one another with a tenderness that was also discipline.

By the time the lessons rolled around each Tuesday evening, the plaza had gone quiet. A few families might linger at the children’s playground; joggers looped the paths along the outskirts; couples sat close on benches. Teenagers would try to sell me weed. But mostly, the space belonged to the rhythm of a tango song. Everything else fell away.

By Wednesday morning, that slow pull of night turned into something else entirely.

Every Wednesday, Argentines packed in from the eastern entrance – the one I used – towards the ballistic shields guarding Congress at the western end, for the pensioners’ protest.

There was a clear contrast across the plaza from day to night; daytime was pre-emptive, wound, advancing. Nighttime was a tonic, inert, stable. No matter how the day went, by the end of it, all that was left was a little bit of debris. The dancers. The joggers, teenagers, couples, and friends. And the steady pulse of a tango song cutting through.

I first joined the pensioners’ protests the same day as the fans of Buenos Aires’ rivaling futbol clubs. They never congregated on that Wednesday or at any of the other protests that followed. They hadn’t convened or concentrated together.

But they did show up in solidarity, as a collective unit, spread out into their own corners of the park, to support the retirees. It was quite monumental considering that they got along so poorly that the city of Buenos Aires barred fans of an opposing team from buying tickets to any away match.

The ferocity built up from east to west. Near the east end where I came in, there were protesters in matching shirts in circles talking amongst each other. Vendors were selling homemade food, beverages, cigarettes, stickers, all types of merchandise out of carts. People were handing out flyers. And people were being numbers at a protest.

The further along you went, the more signs you saw, the weightier and more explicit they got. Solo no se salva nadie (No one is saved alone). Nuestra pobreza es vuestro excedente (Our poverty is your surplus). No nos maten ni a palos ni de hambre (Don’t kill us with sticks or starvation). Milei. Corrupto y verdugo los jubilados. (Milei. Corrupt and executioner of the retirees.)

The further along, the more the chanting picked up. “No toques a los ancianos” (Don’t touch the elderly). “Qué se vayan todos” (All of them must go). “Milei, basura. Tú eres la dictadura.” (Milei, garbage. You are the dictatorship).

To the beat of drums and trumpets, the message was “No nos pegues, somos tus padres” (Don’t hit us, we are your parents).

And, at the very front of the plaza facing Congress were the boldest of all – the front-liners speaking on behalf of the people to the powers inside the building.

But, week after week, those words seemed to fall on deaf ears – the protests had been going on for months at this point, no changes were being made, it was as if they hadn’t noticed.

That could have been the case for those who occupied the inside, but the police officers outside – they were not as unmoved by the demonstrators’ words.

They stood guard in front of the home of Congress straight like an arrow. Tangibly, a narrow bus path separated the Congress building and the officers on its side from Congress park and the citizens. An imaginary line amounting to several feet of empty space. However, the water cannon tanks, the artillery weapons draped across the officers’ torsos, the somber look in the officers’ eyes, and the rigidness that permeated throughout – that was what really created the division.

In the air, you could feel it. One step forward, one step out of line was all it would take. The tension was boiling on each side well before there was any physical action, even when both parties were cleft with their line of separation.

When I first arrived in the middle of the afternoon, the day was mounting, although still intact. The protestors were laying their words on the officers, and the officers were holding their expressions, rarely ever breaking from their lineal police line to acknowledge the crowd. It began peacefully enough. Tense, but intact.

As the numbers grew on each side, that line of separation grew narrower and narrower. Protestors and police both began spilling onto the gridded streets that surround the Congress building. There were signs as tall as parade floats. Voices grew sharper, more cross.

What caught my eye were all the protesters my grandparents’ age standing right where we stood, just rows back from the officers, and how many more were at the front lines. They were not hanging back along the sides; they were toe-to-toe with officers, speaking to them as if they were bad children who needed to be reprimanded.

An elderly woman approached a group of officers who were trailing the northwestern head of the park, asking if they would treat their parents this way.

“Think for a moment. You will be like us one day.”

Another elderly man, “We are your parents.”

And in a moment’s flash: a handful of citizens began throwing small stones and sidewalk debris at the officers. There the glass shattered.

The police responded by dousing the crowd, many of whom were quite elderly, with high-pressure water cannons and rubber bullets. A man my age tried to create a diversion by banging on one of the water tanks. The police quickly seized him, lacerating his bare back on the asphalt pavement as they pulled him by the nape of his sweatshirt hood.

A few members of the crowd set some garbage containers and one of the police cruisers on fire. It only took a handful of people to flip it on its head and there it burned yards in front of Congress in the middle of a street crossing, casting a thick, relentless black smoke.

The police began driving their motorbikes first, around the perimeters of the park and later, directly into the crowds, firing even more rubber bullets. They struck into skin all over the scene. The protestors who were hit had these gaping open wounds. Their clothes were lifted, and you could see five, six, seven bloody circles over their calves and shins, torsos and backs, faces, heads, necks. A man fell over himself, wincing, covering his eye, while others shielded their own.

While that fine line from tense to trouble had been crossed, at no point could it have felt like anyone was ready – like it was the time, like it was warranted – when the police deployed tear gas.

Later I learned a photographer covering the protest had been struck in the head by a canister. He fell to his knees and bled out from the head.

It was said that they hadn’t aimed at anyone in particular, that they didn’t shoot tear gas directly at people, but rather, in the general direction of disorderly people to get them to leave. But they hit the journalist and him alone, just as he was taking a photo of a burning dumpster.

And, a lot of bodies did fly away after that; it was like a second explosion of people dispersing in all different directions throughout the park and the open roadways connected to it. Plenty of others rushed to his aid.

Within a few minutes, the ambulance had gathered his body. He was still clutching his camera as he was carried off by the stretcher.

The nighttime came around, and it was all over the Spanish-speaking side of my news feed. Things were just as bad back home. ICE was getting quotas on how many immigrants they needed to arrest each day. Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident, had been detained after organising protests against the war in Palestine on Columbia University’s campus. We were still supporting Israel after it launched several attacks on the Gaza Strip, formally ending the ceasefire. Just that day, a 25% tariff was imposed, $13 billion of government spending was cut, and the Department of Education was forced to lay off half its workforce.

My lines were blurring. Here in Argentina, my friends also lamented over their new extreme far-right, anti-establishment outsider of a president. Javier Milei ran on a campaign of anti-establishment, positioning himself against the traditional, hyper-elite politician who was to blame for the increase in hyperinflation and poverty. Milei’s background was largely in economics, not politics, and his promise to Argentina was to pull them out of the dire financial situation they were in.

How he was going to do that – cut government spending. He brought a chainsaw along his presidential campaign trail to amplify his message: “Look at all the cutting I will do.”

The theatrics embarrassed them globally. The cutting hurt them at the ground level.

Governmental jobs, public assistance programmes, and healthcare budgets had been erased, public works and scientific projects paused, and wages and pensions were now frozen well below inflation. The food, the gas, the bills, everything went up drastically, but the salaries stayed the same. Milei promised to end the “business of poverty”, and so public assistance programmes, soup kitchens, and other community centres went quickly. Cultural programmes, social programmes, and other vulnerable protection programmes didn’t stand a chance.

There was this rising exasperation against Milei’s austerity measures, but it had peaked when the retirees all but lost their pensions and medical coverage. The month I arrived, the Argentine government had reached a 19% decline in pension spending. And as elderly citizens were packing into Plaza del Congreso every Wednesday, images of Milei alongside Donald Trump and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago circulated. The optics of proximity to power – the theatre of winners and losers.

I never missed the pensioners’ protest the rest of the time I was in town. I never felt like I was doing enough for my own country at this time because I was always gone, and my friends were out protesting on our land, canvassing in our streets, raising funds for our causes, and volunteering on our hotlines.

And I was down in Argentina watching home like a horror film. Then I’d go out into the streets of Buenos Aires and see that they were living it, too. The longer I stayed, the more I recognised the shared emotional climate between here and home. So, each week, I went back to the pensioners’ protest.

In late March, the demonstration was especially poignant because it fell on the same week of the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice in Argentina. The day commemorates the 30,000 some victims that were killed or disappeared under Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 and calls for vigilance against authoritarianism and human rights abuse.

This year marked the 49th anniversary of the military coup. A haunting reminder that the fight is not a linear journey, and the win is not a place you settle into.

The demonstrations lasted the entire day, and they went well beyond the perimeters of Plaza del Congreso. Tens of thousands took to the streets that day. We marched up and down all the major thoroughfares, like Avenida 9 de Julio, Avenida de Mayo, and Avenida Corrientes, chanting “Memoria, verdad y justicia” (Memory, truth, and justice). “Libertad, libertad, libertad” (Liberty, liberty, liberty). “Nunca más” (Never again). The whole city was covered in black paint: Fuera Milei (Out with Milei).

Later that night, I made another round down to Plaza del Congreso and came into a heavy metal show. The posters all said Nunca Mas Festival.

Before the main set, the headliners brought out some members of Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and the crowd erupted. These mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and sisters became the first to publicly protest Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship, calling for justice and accountability from the regime.

The women were now my grandmother’s age. Not frail or indifferent to the times. On stage, they led the crowd: “No surrender.”

And then the show carried on, and the week after that, the tango dancers were back dancing in the park. It dawned on me that I liked watching the lessons so much because it seemed poetic that the senior citizens would choose to dance in a civic space. The same civic space that would be taken over by activists come morning.

There’s this dread that seeps around everyone I know back home. “Is it always going to be like this?” Earning freedoms, watching helplessly as they are ripped away. Having less than an earlier day. I want to look around for reassurance, but all I see are remnants of what was once there. I know my friends in Argentina feel it, too.

It troubled me that the elderly population here was under attack once again by its own government. “What’s it all for if you still have to pick up the posters at the end of your life?” Fifty years ago, it was a physical war – war as we understand it: bodies, blood, disappearances. Today, it’s war and violence and collateral damage all the same, but this time, it’s through starvation. It’s through bleeding budgets dry, it’s through whittling protections down, it’s through taking resources away. Pensioners can’t afford to eat, can’t afford to dress, can’t afford to go to the doctor, can’t afford to call in sick, can’t afford to quit. It’s all violence still. I know my friends in America feel it, too.

Caitlin Behrens

Caitlin Behrens writes creative non-fiction, travelogues, and personal essays. Her work has appeared in WANDER, RUNDELANIA, Across The Margin, Ohio Magazine, and the Wide-Eyed Wanderer anthology. You can find more of her work at linktr.ee/caitlinbehrens or on Instagram @caitlinbehrens.

Argentina Buenos Aires Civil Rights democracy Diaspora Plaza del Congreso tango