Argentina court clears Milei push to scrap foreign land cap — SkimNews
Get the Geopolitics newsletter
Daily geopolitics — wars, elections, sanctions, the diplomatic moves that move markets. Free.
- Argentina's supreme court overturned a previous ruling blocking President Milei's attempt to repeal the 2011 Land Law, clearing the path for reform just two months after a failed congressional effort.
- Foreign entities own approximately 13m hectares (~5%) of Argentina's land, roughly the size of England; in the Patagonian department of Lácar, 54% of land is foreign-owned — far above the 15% cap — with US owners controlling 144,313 hectares, 14 times the Curruhuinca Mapuche community's holdings.
- Milei's La Libertad Avanza passed a stripped-down property bill in the Senate in August, withdrawing a provision that would have raised the foreign land cap from 15% to 25% but retaining articles that fast-track evictions and make expropriation harder.
- Milei's 2024 Rigi investment regime relaxed profit repatriation limits, cut corporate income tax, and exempted machinery imports from duties with 30 years of regulatory stability; a proposed 'super Rigi' would extend those incentives to AI data centres and semiconductor manufacturing requiring massive quantities of water and lithium.
- The Milei government repealed the law suspending Indigenous evictions pending a national land survey and dissolved the national registry of Indigenous communities; in August, the Quintriqueo and Melo communities in Neuquén faced forced removal threats from the Belgian Broers family despite Argentina having recognised their status in 2006.
- Milei signed a glacier law reform in April authorising mining in previously protected regions, and his government dropped the state's case against British billionaire Joe Lewis, accused of fraudulently purchasing 12,000 hectares in a border security zone in Patagonia for his Lago Escondido estate.
- The Center for Argentine Political Economy (CEPA) estimates the annual cost to public coffers of Rigi-incorporated projects at between $1.3bn and $2.3bn (£962m-£1.7bn).
Why it matters: Indigenous communities like the Quintriqueo and Melo in Neuquén are already facing forced removal from ancestral land. With the supreme court clearing Milei's repeal of the 2011 Land Law and Rigi projects estimated to cost taxpayers $1.3bn-$2.3bn annually, protections like the glacier law and the Indigenous eviction moratorium have already been dismantled — and courts are now moving faster on property cases that might once have been contested.
Ask SkimNews
