Argentina's midterm election hands decisive win to Milei's libertarian overhaul

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5. True. It was extortion - and it worked

Argentines tend to be - largely due to their own crisis-wracked history - panicky.

"I have a friend who moved to Spain - and they won't give her a driver's license," the late Argentine comedian Enrique Pinti once noted. "They said to her: You have the reflexes of a spastic!"

Bessent and the other Trump cronies who arranged all this, were no doubt instructed by Milei's goons about that very weakness among Argentines: a PTSD-like fear of losing their savings.

And milk it they did.

It's no secret down there that the 6-point deficit for Milei's LLAcoalition in election-eve polls, was turned around overnight into a 6-point victory thanks mostly to that very fear: that Trump would bark an order to Bessent to "dump those pesos!" if LLA had lost.

Some $2 billion worth of Argentine pesos were bought by the U.S. Treasury to prop up Milei. If they were sold overnight - combined with panic-selling in Argentina itself - it would create a 2001-style crash and collapse.

Argentina's mostly working-class voters knew that - and voted like hostages with a gun held to their heads.

Which is exactly how Needy Amin wants everyone.