By Tomás Trapé - In August 2019, rapper Wos released "Canguro," a song that, over time, became the anthem of the final sprint of the anti-Macri cycle, as a few months later, the Fernándezes would win the October presidential elections. Full of denunciation and power in the midst of the rap wave, it included among its most shouted verses: "And no, we don't need people who work harder / We need, with less, to be able to live in peace / Give it gas, don't get lost, remember where you are / Always check which side of the fuse you're on." At that moment, when the rapper asked "Which side of the fuse are you on?", the sides seemed clear, easy to identify and explain. Although, let's be aware that every simplification contains a trap. At the time, the much-vaunted "unity" served as a slogan, but it overlooked the internal tensions of the electoral Frankenstein that resulted in a government without direction or the ability to move forward. Apparently, that doesn't seem to be the problem of the libertarian movement, which is moving full speed ahead in a clear direction.
On Tuesday, May 13, the national government headed by Javier Milei, through its star spokesperson Manuel Adorni, announced the gradual elimination of tariffs on cell phone imports and other technological products. The measure will be implemented in two stages: the first will reduce tariffs from 16% to 8%, with immediate effect upon publication of the decree; the second will eliminate them completely, reducing them to 0% starting January 15, 2026. Several political figures expressed their concern over this announcement, including the mayor of Río Grande, Martín Pérez, and the governor of Tierra del Fuego, Gustavo Melella. Oscar "el Zurdo" Martínez, a local leader of the UOM (Union of Workers' Organizations), also called for a "total strike" in rejection of the measure. This protest was supported by a large portion of the island's population, as well as leaders and members of unions such as ATSA, SUTEF, ASOEM, ASIMRA, the Center of Commerce Employees (CEC), the Light and Power Union, as well as council members and provincial government officials. In contrast, several figures in the national public discourse celebrated the decision, generating surprising coincidences between figures seemingly positioned on opposing ideological sides. On social media—especially on the platform formerly known as Twitter—conspiracy theories, cross accusations, and sharp but empty speeches proliferated, even from users who had never previously spoken out on the issue. Often, the temptation to opine on everything collapses the digital conversation, flooding it with noise rather than information or solid arguments.
In an attempt to organize the situation and think beyond the immediate echo of social media, we spoke with Juan Augusto Rattenbach, a lawyer with a master's degree in applied economics and a university professor. He was born in the Río de la Plata but has his heart set on the Malvinas.
Juan Augusto Rattenbach. Lawyer (UBA), Master's in Applied Economics (UTDT), content advisor for the Malvinas Museum, and Coordinator of the Malvinas, Antarctica, South Atlantic, and the La Plata Basin Working Group of OCIPEx.
Tomás Trapé - Those were some hectic days at "X," where each user creates a straw man tailored to their needs. I'd like to take this opportunity to speak in other terms, but to start somewhere. What's at stake for you with Law 19.640 and the measures announced by the government?
Juan Rattenbach - To begin with, Law 19,640 of 1972 created a system for the economic promotion of Tierra del Fuego, which was later ratified by the National Congress in 1974. The objective was always clear from a geopolitical perspective: to prepare the island's economic conditions for the moment when Argentina regains full sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands and guarantees our position in Antarctica, with clear incentives for families in the provinces located north of the Strait of Magellan to choose Tierra del Fuego as their life project. The measures announced by the government to lower tariffs to zero on the import of final goods put 7,000 direct and indirect jobs at risk on an island with fewer than 200,000 inhabitants. In proportional demographic terms, it is as if 120,000 people in the City of Buenos Aires lost their jobs overnight. Therefore, the people of the province, aware of the impact this measure could have, led by the UOM, mobilized in defense of Tierra del Fuego labor as a matter of sovereignty.
TT: Some accused us of putting the Malvinas issue at the service of the Tierra del Fuego special regime…
JR: It's the other way around. Tierra del Fuego's special regime is what serves the Malvinas cause. The province's geography can't be partially skewed to make the numbers on an Excel spreadsheet or a simple report add up. A "simulation game" made in Buenos Aires. Tierra del Fuego is inseparable from the Malvinas Islands not only because they are part of the same province, but also because they form the same geopolitical space with Antarctica. The Malvinas War, as a historical episode, is also crucial. Beginning in June 1982, the British went from occupying only the archipelagos as a whole to usurping, through the use of force and militarizing the region, 200 miles around each island, ultimately seizing 25% of our country's insular and maritime surface. In other words, both the Malvinas War and the subsequent aftermath of the deepening of British colonialism in the South Atlantic further revalued the geopolitical importance of Tierra del Fuego and the greater need to maintain the special promotion regime.
TT: Federico Sturzenegger wrote in X that the province “has everything: mysticism, sailing, trekking, crossing the Andes, glaciers, gastronomy, off-season skiing (…) It should be a world-class amusement park.” Why does Río Grande have to be industrial and what are the limits of the other proposed alternatives?
JR: Sturzenegger went a bit further and suggested that Tierra del Fuego "should be an amusement park," expressing the true ideology of the project, which is to dismantle the framework built in recent years with the clear goal of depopulating the island and returning to square one. But I repeat: our geopolitical reality today is worse given the Malvinas War than it was in 1972, when the special regime was implemented. Going to your question, Río Grande, through the Austral Basin, has become the country's second largest gas supplier after Neuquén, allowing it to have a fundamental competitive vector for the production of manufactured goods, while Ushuaia, straddling the Beagle Channel and the mighty Andes, has always been oriented toward national and international tourism. The problem that no one wants to address, besides the deliberate omissions regarding the Malvinas and geopolitics, is what alternative can generate the most quality employment. Many of the activities presented as "discoveries of gunpowder" are already taking place on the island and not only could they not generate enough jobs to reabsorb those displaced from the industrial sector, but they also have lower incomes and less labor protection. This is a very complex debate, and all aspects must be considered.
TT: Manuel Adorni on the other hand declared that “Today a cell phone in Argentina costs twice as much as in Brazil and the United States”, and he described an image that sounds familiar to us all “there were people who paid for a plane ticket and a hotel to buy something as basic as a cell phone in another country” What does the country gain and what does it lose according to you?
JR: I would ask Adorni, a virtuoso economist: How much of the final price of a cell phone, a television, or an air conditioner consumed in the country's large urban centers corresponds to production costs, and how much corresponds to costs associated with logistics, distribution, and marketing? What is the price of a product leaving the factory and what is the final price sold in a shopping center? How much do Tierra del Fuego companies actually keep, and how much will be used to pay rent, for example, for a commercial space in an Eduardo Elsztain shopping mall? Turning to the problem of the fiscal deficit , how is the lack of tax revenue supposed to be resolved by lowering taxes? How will the measure be offset in fiscal terms? Leaving these questions aside, let's move on to another issue: What guarantee do we have that if we lower tariffs, the final price of imported electronic goods will drop in line with the reduction in taxes? The reality is none. We have a real-life example: in 2017 (an election year), the Macri administration, while Sturzenegger was president of the Central Bank and some members of FUNDAR were officials at the Ministry of Production (Juan Carlos Hallak), lowered tariffs on imported notebooks and netbooks. The result? 700 jobs were lost in Tierra del Fuego and prices remained unchanged . In other words, importing companies effectively pay fewer tariffs, but they don't translate that tax benefit into lower prices. If we add to that the government's obsession with crushing wages by destroying collective bargaining agreements, the reality is that purchasing power will always be at a disadvantage when it comes to buying electronic products. Which leads us to the following conclusion: anything not produced in Tierra del Fuego will be imported directly from Buenos Aires. Now, we all know the names of Tierra del Fuego's main business owners, but do we know the electronics importers in Buenos Aires? How many are there, how many jobs do they create, and under what conditions? How will this impact demand for dollars when Argentina eventually becomes a net importer of electronics?
TT: In that sense, I ask you why no one raises the question in terms of development: Are there options to reduce the logistics costs of production in Tierra del Fuego?
JR: Of course, and it's "omitted" by pure chance. Río Grande is the southernmost industrial hub in the world facing the Argentine Sea. However, it doesn't have its own port . This means that the entry of inputs for production is done through the port of Ushuaia, which prioritizes entry to luxury cruise ships that tour the Malvinas and Antarctica. Therefore, a cargo ship for "non-tourist" purposes could wait up to 50 days to finally unload, significantly increasing primary production costs. One option to lower the prices of Tierra del Fuego industrial products is through the construction of a multimodal port in Río Grande, which would drastically reduce logistics costs. This path, linked to an improvement in production, is very different from those that propose reorienting Argentine consumption toward imports of external final goods, which will ultimately support the wages of industrial workers who do the same work as in Tierra del Fuego but in other special regimes, such as those in Manaus (Brazil), Bac Ninh (Vietnam), or Shenzhen (China).
TT: What's the status of the Rio Grande port project? Why wasn't it done sooner?
JR: It was clearly intended and was always on the agenda. The question is, in an Argentina experiencing periodic crises, where will the funds come from to finance a project of this nature? That's how the first project came with Chinese financing under the guise of "foreign direct investment." As soon as the news spread that China was interested in building a port in Río Grande, we had two visits from the heads of the United States Southern Command, one in April 2021 and a better-known one in 2024. The purpose of the Southern Command's presence was to prohibit any type of Chinese investment in Tierra del Fuego because it "would undermine its national security." The most intuitive question would be, if Southern Command exerts military pressure on Argentina to prevent the development of civilian port infrastructure in Río Grande with Chinese capital, could US capital then finance the project? The negative answer to this question is precisely because if the United States invested even one dollar in infrastructure in Tierra del Fuego that would benefit Argentina, it would immediately provoke protests from the British, who would see it as a threat to their colonial position in the Malvinas. Thus, there was no other solution than for Tierra del Fuego capitalism itself to finance the project, leaving the project in the hands of a company benefiting from the regime. The National Undersecretariat of Ports, for its part, bureaucratically delayed the project. Just when the path to progress was more or less clear, Sturzenegger's measure was announced, convulsing the entire province. Furthermore, the tools the province currently has to diversify its economy, such as the Fund for the Expansion of the Productive Matrix, are paralyzed. Perhaps, in their project to turn Tierra del Fuego into an "amusement park," it wouldn't be necessary for the city of Río Grande to have access to the sea through a port.
TT: What is this fund? What is its purpose?
JR: The Productive Matrix Expansion Fund (FAMP) was created in the context of the 2021 extension. Of the 21% VAT withheld by companies benefiting from the industrial promotion sub-regime, 15% is allocated to this fund, which aims to diversify Tierra del Fuego's economic matrix. During the current government administration, projects have been paralyzed due to the suspension of national public works in the province. This includes not only road paving but also defense infrastructure projects.
TT: Which ones for example?
JR: The Ushuaia Antarctic Logistics Hub project, after the United States Southern Command ensured there was no Chinese involvement, began construction in 2022 through budget allocations from the National Defense Fund (FONDEF). In 2024, we received little news about the progress of the project, coupled with strong rumors of the privatization of the TANDANOR shipyard, the company in charge of its construction. At the beginning of 2025, nothing more was heard from the FONDEF, and, given the uncertainty about how the project would be financed, in February some libertarian communicators on social media announced that the Antarctic Logistics Hub would be financed with money from the FAMP (National Defense Fund). Therefore, for every Tierra del Fuego industrial good consumed, Argentina's defense infrastructure in the South Atlantic is directly financed, enhancing its national reach in Antarctica and making our country a benchmark in the export of Antarctic logistics services. Therefore, the destruction of Tierra del Fuego's economy is not only an economic and industrial issue, but also a matter of national defense.
TT: Why do you think there's consensus among such diverse sectors on repealing the regime? Do you think there's foreign funding to influence domestic public opinion?
JR: I take this opportunity to clarify, especially for those who felt singled out, that I never accused anyone of being a “British agent” because it is a very serious matter and constitutes a crime as provided for in Article 7 of Law 13,895 of 1950, which shall be punished with imprisonment of one to twenty-five years for anyone who, by any means, disorganizes, destroys, deteriorates or renders useless, in whole or in part, temporarily or permanently, documents, objects, materials, installations, services or industries of any nature, with the purpose of disturbing, delaying or impeding the military, economic, financial, social, scientific or industrial development of the Nation, which in turn is aggravated to life imprisonment in the case of serving a foreign power . Therefore, I never said that anyone is a “British agent”, but many of the detractors of the regime do not propose to improve it but rather intend to plainly dismantle it, a fact that would only benefit the British position and the colonial status quo in the Malvinas and the South Atlantic . It seems that when you mention the word "Malvinas," some people get nervous because they're comfortable not talking about it. And now, I'll move on to the topic of FUNDAR, and with some objective data: it's a civil association created a couple of years ago by a millionaire philanthropist (Sebastián Ceria) who lives in Great Britain with the goal of influencing debates regarding national public policies, but without showing his face and exposing himself, ultimately attempting to influence the material reality of Argentina without leaving his apartment 13,000 kilometers away in England . In other words, the people of Tierra del Fuego not only have to deal with the attacks from Buenos Aires, but also those coming from London. Furthermore, I understand that FUNDAR is not a political group; it's not that one can "join the military," but that one works for FUNDAR like any private company; that is, it's a civil association that is supported anabolically by philanthropic donations. Today, in political terms, FUNDAR has become a substitute for the officials of Francisco Cabrera and Dante Sica (Macri) or Matías Kulfas (Alberto Fernández). They pontificate from a pedestal about what the solutions for Argentina would be, shamefully and dishonestly hiding the fact that they were part of the decision-making process from December 2015 to December 2023. They didn't hesitate to celebrate the measure announced by Adorni as if it were their own, echoing on social media that Argentina's problem is "the union oligarchy" (?). Before telling us what we should do, they should first tell us what they did when they were in government.
TT: It's striking that the focus of the media debate is on maintaining the status quo or overthrowing the regime. Almost no one talks about modifying and/or improving the tool, and it feels like the nuance, but also the depth, of the discussion is lost.
JR: FUNDAR, which was an NGO unknown to the public at the time, launched its 150-page "star" public debut report in June 2023, after "a year of research," a project we've even discussed on a Cabaret Voltaire program. For them, the problem of the fiscal deficit was never the Central Bank's remunerated liabilities created by the Sturzenegger/Caputo monetary policy through the LEBACS and later the LELIQS. In other words, FUNDAR starts out wanting to become an actor in the national public agenda by attacking industrial production, high wages, skilled and registered employment, and high union membership rates in the most important place in national geopolitics (Tierra del Fuego), which is Argentina's gateway to Antarctica, without mentioning in any of its 150 pages the Malvinas, the British occupation, NATO military exercises, or the recurring visits of the United States Southern Command to Ushuaia. Their "transition" and "population" proposal to repeal the regime is for laid-off industrial workers to receive a subsidy (equivalent to 82% of their salary) without working for 10 years. In other words, industrial workers who work and produce, and who are also affiliated with the UOM, are a threat to society. It's better for them to stay home and live without working. That is, they shouldn't produce, at least not what they consume. The last straw is that, despite this ridiculous proposal, they came out to celebrate Sturzenegger's measure without any question, "magically" forgetting their own transition proposal and acknowledging that they never cared about the workers of Tierra del Fuego, but rather want to overthrow the regime at any cost and depopulate the island. What's interesting about this week's social media debate is that the silence regarding the Malvinas Islands has been broken, and it's now clear that the province can no longer be discussed in a partial or biased manner, without considering geopolitical, diplomatic, and defense variables. No one is defending the status quo and leaving things as they are. Either we move forward and improve in terms of sovereignty, or we dismantle them and regress with a Fuegian exodus. Because, despite what many may think, the Malvinas Islands are Argentine and are part of the province of Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica, and the South Atlantic Islands.
*Note originally published by DigitalNews on 5/18/2025, and then removed without explanation.
