Argentina top court clears Milei land reform push — SkimNews
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- Argentina's supreme court overturned a previous ruling that had blocked President Milei's repeal of the 2011 Land Law, clearing the path for the controversial reform just two months after a failed effort in Congress.
- Foreign entities own approximately 13 million hectares of Argentine land — about 5%, roughly the size of England — with the Patagonian department of Lácar exceeding both legal caps at 54% foreign-owned, including 30% concentrated in a small number of US entities.
- Milei's La Libertad Avanza party passed a stripped-down version of its inviolability of private property bill in the Senate in August, withdrawing provisions that would have raised the foreign land cap from 15% to 25%; the version approved still includes articles to fast-track evictions and make expropriation harder.
- Indigenous communities face escalating displacement — Milei's government repealed the law suspending Indigenous evictions, dissolved the national registry of Indigenous communities, and the Quintriqueo and Melo communities in Neuquén were threatened with removal by the Belgian Broers family in August.
- The Rigi investment regime provides regulatory stability for 30 years, relaxes profit repatriation limits, cuts corporate tax and exempts imported machinery from tariffs; a proposed "super Rigi" would extend these terms to AI datacentres and lithium mega-projects, with CEPA estimating annual public costs of $1.3bn–$2.3bn.
- Thousands marched on September 19 in the "marcha de la bronca" ("march of anger"), with 84-year-old activist Marta Sahores in Esquel, Chubut, denouncing the government's "handover" of water and soil to foreign investors.
Why it matters: Foreign investors and large landowners gain from eased land caps and 30 years of regulatory stability under Rigi, while Mapuche and other Indigenous groups face accelerating evictions now that the Land Law repeal has cleared its supreme court hurdle and prior safeguards have been stripped. The CEPA estimate of $1.3bn–$2.3bn in annual public costs quantifies the fiscal trade-off of courting investors in extractive and frontier mega-projects.
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