🇦🇷 On March 31, 2025, the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INDEC) of Argentina released a groundbreaking report: poverty in the country dropped by an impressive 14.8 percentage points in the second semester of 2024, falling from 52.9% in the first semester to 38.1%. This places Argentina’s poverty rate at its lowest since the first semester of 2022, a remarkable turnaround in just six months. This news has proven to be nothing short of confounding for the left—both in Argentina and Spain—leaving them disoriented and scrambling for explanations. The data not only challenges their ideological foundations but also contradicts the narrative they’ve clung to over the past year. Let’s unpack this phenomenon and explore why the left finds itself so thoroughly unsettled.

According to INDEC’s Encuesta Permanente de Hogares (Permanent Household Survey), which covers 31 urban agglomerations, the poverty rate fell to 38.1% of individuals and 28.6% of households by the end of 2024. This translates to approximately 17.9 million people living below the poverty line, a reduction of roughly 1.6 million compared to the 19.5 million recorded in the second semester of 2023. Even more striking, the indigence rate—those unable to afford even a basic food basket—plummeted from 11.9% (3.5 million people) to 8.2% (3.9 million people), lifting around one million individuals out of extreme poverty. Meanwhile, the number of non-poor individuals rose from 17.2 million to 18.4 million, a clear sign that people are not just escaping indigence but moving out of poverty altogether.

This dramatic improvement comes after a peak of 52.9% poverty in the first semester of 2024, a figure that marked the highest level in two decades and was recorded during the early months of President Javier Milei’s administration. The turnaround in the second half of the year, however, suggests that the economic policies implemented under Milei’s liberal agenda—focused on curbing inflation, boosting real wages, and stabilizing the economy—are yielding tangible results.

For the political left, these numbers present a profound challenge. Leftist ideology often holds that liberal economic policies—such as deregulation, reduced government spending, and market-driven reforms—benefit only the wealthy elite, widening inequality and deepening poverty. In their worldview, such policies are a conspiracy of oligarchs to enrich the rich at the expense of the poor. Yet, the INDEC data reveals the opposite: under Milei’s liberal framework, the poor are becoming less poor, and millions are crossing the threshold into economic stability.

This creates a stark conflict between ideology and reality. An honest observer might pause to reassess their beliefs, acknowledging that the simplistic narrative of liberalism as inherently exploitative may lack nuance. Perhaps the world is more complex than their ideology allows, and factors like inflation control and wage growth can, in fact, lift the disadvantaged when paired with market-oriented reforms. But for the less introspective—or the outright dishonest—the response is different: when reality clashes with ideology, they reject reality itself, doubling down on their preconceptions rather than confronting them.

Beyond ideology, the left’s disarray stems from a year of consuming a steady diet of dire predictions about Argentina’s fate under Milei. Throughout 2024, leftist audiences in Argentina and Spain were bombarded by media outlets, political analysts, and commentators who painted a picture of unrelenting catastrophe. They were told repeatedly that Argentina’s economy was collapsing, that poverty was spiraling out of control, that jobs were vanishing, that real wages were shrinking, and that Milei’s government teetered on the brink of collapse. This narrative was so pervasive that many came to accept it as gospel, expecting each month to bring worse news than the last.

Then came the INDEC report. A 14.8-point drop in poverty—a reduction of nearly 7 million people from the peak earlier in the year—shattered this storyline. Far from a failing economy, Argentina saw its GDP grow, employment in its 31 largest cities reach historic highs, and real incomes rise significantly. Between the first and second semesters of 2024, household income surged by 64.5%, outpacing the 22.2% increase in the basic food basket (CBA) and the 26.7% rise in the total basic basket (CBT), as reported by INDEC. These figures expose the disconnect between the leftist narrative and the lived reality, leaving its adherents reeling from cognitive dissonance.

Faced with this contradiction, the left has two paths: question the sources that fed them a skewed version of events or deny the data itself. Many have chosen the latter, unwilling to admit that their trusted media and analysts might have been inept, biased, or deliberately misleading. After all, if you’ve spent a year convinced that Argentina was descending into chaos, how do you reconcile that with evidence of progress?

Rather than let the data dismantle their narrative, segments of the left have deployed three distinct strategies to discredit the INDEC findings, each more desperate than the last.

The first tactic is to undermine the credibility of INDEC itself, suggesting it’s a tool of Milei’s administration, manipulating statistics to paint a rosy picture. Critics argue that the institute is massaging the numbers to favor the government. However, this claim falters under scrutiny. INDEC is an independent public body, and its current director, Marco Lavagna, was appointed not by Milei but by the previous Peronist government under Alberto Fernández. While historical instances of government interference in INDEC’s data—like during the Kirchner years—have occurred, such manipulation was always evident through glaring discrepancies with private estimates. Today, no such gap exists. Private projections, such as those from the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, have tracked a steady decline in poverty for months, aligning closely with INDEC’s official figures. In fact, when these private estimates emerged in late 2024, the same critics dismissed them as unreliable, insisting only INDEC’s official data mattered—until, of course, it contradicted their narrative.

The second approach is to cast doubt on how poverty is measured. Outlets like Spain’s *El País* have suggested that INDEC’s methodology—comparing household income to the cost of basic food and service baskets—excludes key expenses like rent, education, and healthcare, and is overly sensitive to inflation and wage fluctuations. This critique implies the poverty drop might be an illusion. Yet, this argument collapses on two fronts. First, INDEC’s methodology hasn’t changed. If it’s flawed now, it was equally flawed when it reported a 52.9% poverty rate in early 2024—a figure the left embraced without hesitation. Second, some criticisms are outright false. Economist Martín Rozada, a respected voice in private poverty estimates, has debunked claims that rent isn’t included in the Canasta Básica Total (CBT), calling such assertions either ignorant or deliberately misleading. The methodology, imperfect as it may be, is consistent, making the 2024 decline directly comparable to past semesters—and just as real.

The third strategy veers into the realm of the absurd, as some leftist voices on social media concoct wild explanations to dismiss the data. One claim posits that poverty fell because the poor became indigent instead—but INDEC shows indigence dropped by a million people, not rose. Another, even more far-fetched, suggests that a million indigents either died of starvation or fled the country, thus vanishing from the statistics. This grim fantasy imagines streets littered with corpses or mass emigration, yet INDEC’s data refutes it entirely: the non-poor population grew by 1.2 million, from 17.2 million to 18.4 million. These individuals didn’t disappear; they climbed out of poverty. Such tales are less arguments than coping mechanisms, offering a flimsy escape from the uncomfortable truth.

At its core, the left’s bewilderment reflects an inability—or unwillingness—to grapple with the success of Milei’s policies. The evidence suggests a clear mechanism: inflation, which soared in early 2024, was tamed in the second half of the year, while nominal wages outpaced rising costs, boosting purchasing power. Programs like the Asignación Universal por Hijo (AUH) and Tarjeta Alimentar, preserved and enhanced, further cushioned the vulnerable. The result? A million fewer indigents, a stable number of non-indigent poor, and 1.2 million more non-poor citizens—all in a single year.

This is a bitter pill for a left that spent 2024 prophesying doom. Rather than reconsider their assumptions or the media echo chambers they inhabit, many prefer to cling to their story, even as it unravels. They’d rather dive into the abyss of denial—doubting INDEC, twisting methodology, spinning ludicrous yarns—than admit that liberal reforms might just work. In doing so, they don’t kill the data; they only expose their own disconnect from reality.

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