First some of the good news. A plan was sent to Congress to change the Central Bank charter that will make financing the Treasury through the peso printer a felony. It imposes criminal penalties on deficit monetization, one of Argentina’s core problems since the start of the BCRA early last century.

Besides all this, the chainsaw keeps roaring to make sure the bloated public sector is gutted as much as possible, which keeps federal spending in check. As of now, more than 71,000 public sector employees have been severed from the state apparatus.

The effective tax burden continues to decline nationwide; a gradual and slow process that shouldn’t be interrupted in 2027 if Argentina wants to reach the levels of the 1990s.

Next to less fiscal pressure, the BCRA has been stacking US Tokens like there’s no tomorrow, and is now closing in on 50 billion USD gross and 12 billion net reserves. These are very much needed given the maturities Argentina is facing in the next 24 months.

Even despite selling a record number of pesos tu buy Benjamins, the exchange rate has only begun to move a little in the last couple of trading days, surpassing the 1600 pesos per USD threshold for the first time in forever. The upper band is at 1800, and the peso is still very far removed from that level (if it would get there too quickly, we might see inflation pick up again).

So all in all, the macro picture is very sound and is everything is running according to plan (TMAP - Todo Marcha Acorde al Plan).

So what about the political and micro picture? Below I will discuss Milei’s recent decline in popularity and his weight on the Brazilian elections later this year in October.

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While the whole country watched the national team play its way to the World Cup final, the government picked that exact window to make its two biggest institutional moves of the year: a full 2026-27 financial program and a Central Bank reform that would rewrite the BCRA charter back to its 1935 wording.

It also closed the file that had been dragging the administration through the mud for months, with Adorni finally handing in his resignation. Add the cleanest inflation print in almost a year and this is the densest issue we have run in the series so far.

About the final itself: Argentina lost, and the country is still processing it. If you trust the signs, though, there is a consolation prize hidden in the pattern: Argentina lifted the Cup in 1978 under a broke military junta, in 1986 with the Austral plan falling apart, and in 2022 with inflation pushing 100%.

The trophy has only ever arrived with the economy in tatters. Losing one with a fiscal surplus, sub-2% monthly inflation, and country risk at a Milei-era low might be the most bullish result in the history of Argentine football.

Argentina also lost the final in 1990 after winning in 1986, and many prosperous years followed in the early 1990s, with the single biggest difference with today being that most of that prosperity was built on a fiscal deficit.

Here is what is covered inside:

• The Sub-2% Print: monthly inflation under 2% for the first time since August, annual at 33% and heading for 30% by December, and why consensus now treats 2%-or-below as the new baseline.

• A Peso That Weakens on Paper Only: near 1,500 per dollar nominally yet almost 10% stronger in real terms since January, and why the euro and the yen tell you this is an energy story rather than an Argentina story.

• The USD 12.5bn Buying Spree: the BCRA already past its full-year reserve target, a USD 532m single-day record on July 15, and what the growing pile means ahead of the 2027 vote.

• Country Risk at 407bps: the lowest of the Milei era, Macri’s 342bp record within sight, and why the government still refuses to borrow at 8%.

• The 2026-27 Financial Program: USD 19.2 billion due this year against USD 22.9 billion lined up, a USD 3.7 billion buffer carried into a heavier 2027, and a baseline that assumes zero access to international markets.

• The BCRA Reform: six changes heading to Congress, from a single price-stability mandate to criminal penalties for financing the deficit with the printer, plus a ban on the Letras Intransferibles trick that drained reserves for a decade.

• Adorni’s Exit: the resignation that ended the sketchiest saga of the year, the 78% who wanted him gone, and the 10-15 point CABA dent LLA now has to repair.

• Bullrich Sidelined, Santilli Rising: the best-polling politician in the coalition pushed to the margins while the new Chief of Staff consolidates power, and the 2027 chessboard taking shape.

• Mara’s read: why institution-building in an election year is the real tell, and where the political risk moved after Adorni.

Onwards.

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The government promised to fight back. On July 1st officials called the ruling a “delirium” and would go to the Corte Suprema. Since then, silence. No outlet has seen the actual appeal.

This Patagonian rodent has.

A copy of the recurso extraordinario federal landed on my desk this week, which runs 36 pages and carries the signatures of Sebastián Amerio, the Procurador del Tesoro, the state’s top lawyer, his deputy Santiago Castro Videla, and counsel for the Ministry of Security and the DNM.

When the Procurador del Tesoro signs a brief personally instead of delegating it three floors down, the Casa Rosada considers the matter existential.

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Manuel Adorni went from Milei's most trusted messenger to his biggest liability in under three years, and the story of how that happened and how it ended tells you more about Argentine power politics than any textbook could. Onwards.

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A few hours later, in a courtroom most of those FT readers will never hear about, three electoral judges took a red pen to the legal scaffolding the whole thing was built on. This happened after my Friday piece, which discussed one ruling that had already set the tone for the judicial mood around citizenship laws in Argentina.

One of them was a polished pitch aimed at family offices and private-bank clients. The other was a court ruling about a Chinese supermarket owner in a town of a few thousand people in Entre Ríos. Today that ruling was made public.

Guess which one decides whether you can buy an Argentine passport next year. The collision between those two stories is the most interesting thing to happen in the mobility world all year, and almost nobody has connected them yet. Here we go.

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Argentina runs on a quiet fiction that everyone agrees to ignore until a judge decides not to. The fiction is that a president can rewrite laws passed by Congress whenever governing the normal way feels slow.

The tool for this is the decreto de necesidad y urgencia, the decree of necessity and urgency, or DNU for short. Every modern Argentine president has reached for it, and Milei has not even reached for it more enthusiastically than previous presidents (he uses it quite moderately in comparison).

Usually Milei’s Executive Orders point in a direction this four-pawed friend also likes: less state, fewer forms, ¡AFUERA!, but the citizenship part of the migration reform was definitely not part of that; it made acquiring citizenship through residency needlessly complicated, while also creating a CBI framework in tandem.

Not being allowed to leave the country even one single day within the two years prior to applying for citizenship is counter effective for precisely the residents and citizens Argentina should want to attract: business people who will travel in and out often, but still spend most of their time in Argentina as their home base. Apparently, I was no alone in that sentiment.

On June 18, 2026, a federal appeals court in Buenos Aires picked up the migration decree, and looked at the part dealing with citizenship, and ruled that it never should have been a decree at all.

The court declared the citizenship provisions of Decree 366/2025 unconstitutional, revoked a lower court that had waved them through, and ordered a federal judge to take back jurisdiction over a naturalization case the government had tried to hand off to an administrative office.

Your Southern Cone gnawer has the ruling in hand, all twelve pages of it, and we are going to go through it properly. You can also download it here (Spanish version only):

Declara Inconstitucional Decreto 3662025

271KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The judges in the case of this Russian-named applicant did not strike this down on a technicality, but instead reached for the deepest plumbing of the Argentine constitution and reminded the executive branch that the separation of powers is still load-bearing, even under a president who campaigned with a chainsaw.

Before anyone forwards this with the headline "Court cancels Milei's citizenship decree," let’s put a leash on that. Milei’s decree is wounded, but far from buried.

Why this particular decree flunked

Decree 366/2025 was signed on May 28, 2025. We are now one year and one month further, without a working CBI program, but that is a side note for this ruling.

The decree’s own recitals, the considerandos where the executive is supposed to explain why it could not wait, say nothing about why the legislative route was impossible. When a President claims an emergency so severe it justifies sidelining Congress through a decree, and Congress was sitting right there the whole time, you have a problem and the decree will be open for attack by the courts.

The urgency claim fared no better. Even if you grant, for the sake of argument, that fast-moving migratory flows could justify treating immigration as urgent, citizenship is a different animal.

To naturalize in Argentina you generally need two years of legal residence, a requirement that goes back to the constitution’s founders. Something that by design takes years cannot plausibly be the kind of emergency that cannot wait for a parliamentary debate.

Then the judges delivered the line that should be printed on a mug. The decree was signed in May 2025. The Dirección Nacional de Migraciones (DNM), the immigration office, only enabled the online citizenship procedure on its website on October 6, 2025, more than four months later. The instruction manual for actually doing the procedure was published in March 2026, roughly ten months after the supposed emergency.

As the court put it, these delays happened inside the very administration that invoked the urgency. Normally, arsonists do not get to declare a house fire and then spend ten months looking for the matches. So on the first and biggest question, the court’s conclusion was clean: the conditions the constitution demands for a DNU simply were not present.

Up until today, there have still been 0 citizenships processed by Migraciones, and the people online waving an Argie passport around that they just obtained are all from grandfathered court cases preceding Milei’s decree.

The defect the judges found on their own

Judges normally rule only on what the parties put in front of them. In this particular ruling, the panel flagged a second constitutional problem that the applicant had not even raised, because they felt they could not look past it.

Argentine citizenship proceedings have always involved the Ministerio Público Fiscal (MPF), the public prosecutor’s office, whose job is to defend legality and the general interests of society. It is a watchdog, and a specific law, 27.148, requires the MPF to intervene in all citizenship cases. The Supreme Court has reaffirmed this as recently as March 2026, after Decree 366/2025 was already in force.

Milei’s decree moved citizenship from federal judges to an administrative office, but it never repealed the MPF requirement and never explained how that office would be honored. It just vanished from the process.

The decree also quietly killed two old safeguards: previously, naturalization required the publication of edictos, public notices of each citizenship application, and allowed third parties to object. Both of these were gone, with nothing put in their place.

The court’s point is not nostalgia for paperwork; these were the mechanisms that let the system catch fraud, error, or someone naturalizing who should not be (a famous example of Venezuelan celebrity Catherine Fulop who was denied citizenship in 2019 for her remarks around the Holocaust). Strip them out and you have a faster process with the brakes removed.

The sharpest observation came from inside the decree itself, because it contained no judicial or administrative steps for the citizenship process that was moved to DNM, no deadlines, review mechanism, role of the prosecuter, no path to a judge or appeals.

According to this recent ruling, the executive plainly understood that decisions stripping or granting rights need judicial oversight, because it wrote that oversight into the immigration half. Then it skipped the same protection for citizenship, a matter the Argentine Constitution itself singles out specifically. Naturalization cannot be placed beyond the reach of a judge, and this decree tried to do exactly that.

What else just lost its footing

On paper the Volosh case was about one narrow thing: whether a judge or Migraciones decides to grant her Argentine citizenship. But the court did not pick out one bad article, instead it ruled that the entire citizenship reform was an illegitimate use of a decree, because citizenship belongs to Congress and no emergency justified the shortcut.

For anyone in the process or thinking about applying for Argentine citizenship, here is what that means in plain terms (with the standing caveat that none of it is final until the higher courts weigh in):

• The two-years-without-leaving rule: Probably one of the most [redacted] parts of Milei’s decree, which suddenly required continuous permanence in Argentina without even leaving for a weekend trip to Santiago or Colonia. The old law asked for two years of “continuous residence,” and for over a century the courts read it like sane people: a normal life with the occasional trip abroad still counted. Article 37 of the decree redefined it, declaring that you reside continuously only if you stayed in the territory the full two years sin haber realizado ninguna salida al exterior, without making a single departure abroad. The two-year residency period itself is written into the Constitution and is not going anywhere. The cruel no-exit gloss bolted on top of it is a pure invention of the decree, so it falls with the rest of Title III. Back to the old framework, and an ordinary life with ordinary travel counts again.

• Judges, not only Migraciones: The handoff of naturalization from federal judges to DNM lives in Article 39 of the decree. The court ordered the judge to reassume the case and reminded everyone that naturalization, named in Article 20 of the Constitution, cannot be placed beyond judicial reach. So the judicial route to citizenship is not dead, since this federal chamber just said the courthouse door is still open.

• The decree’s own CBI investment route: The decree created a citizenship-by-investment track of its own, a passport for foreigners who make a “relevant investment” no matter how briefly they have lived in Argentina, run by a brand-new investment-citizenship agency under the Economy Ministry. That track is written into the very same Title III the court found unconstitutional, so the decree-based investment route is exposed to the identical challenge as everything else here. That is a different thing from a real citizenship-by-investment framework written as a law and passed by Congress, which would stand on far firmer ground precisely because it would be a law and not a decree.

What this ruling does NOT do

This was a ruling by the Cámara Civil y Comercial Federal, Sala III, a federal appeals court. It is not the Supreme Court. Argentina’s top court could still take the case and rule the other way, and given that this touches a flagship Milei reform, the government has every incentive to appeal.

That said, this is not one stray panel acting alone. More than one of the three divisions of the capital’s federal appeals court has now landed on the same conclusion within days of each other, striking the citizenship provisions on the same reasoning.

The decision resolves a concrete case, the application of one person, and orders the federal judge to take her file back, but it is not an erga omnes strike-down that erases the decree for everyone overnight. In practice, a ruling like this from a federal appeals chamber carries real weight and will be cited by every lawyer fighting the same battle, so the persuasive force is large. The legal status, though, is still “this decree is unconstitutional as applied here,” not “this decree no longer exists.”

The court was also careful about scope. It explicitly left the immigration provisions of the decree alone, even conceding that the urgency argument is at least arguable for migration, where flows really can move fast. The knife came down on the citizenship half, the transfer of naturalization away from federal judges, and nothing more.

And to close the loop on citizenship by investment, since the section above already untangled the two versions: the decree’s own CBI investment route shares the decree’s legal fate, while a proper investment-citizenship law passed by Congress would not. The lesson runs the same direction as the whole ruling. Build the thing on legislation, where this court says it belongs, and it stands. Bolt it onto a decree, and one chamber can knock it over.

What this means for aspiring Argies

One of the key items here that has just lost its legal footing is the insane two-years-without-leaving rule. If you have been chaining yourself to Argentine soil, skipping family visits, weddings or funerals abroad, all to protect a residency clock the decree said one trip would reset, this ruling reopens the older and gentler reading where a normal life with normal travel still counts.

Important to note is that none of it is guaranteed, since the case can still climb to the Supreme Court, the courts that resume these files may still take around two years, and some judges have applied the stricter reading since the reform landed. But the legal basis for the harshest version, the zero-days-abroad rule, is now under direct fire from the capital’s own appellate court.

The Migraciones Mirage

If you were counting on the DNM administrative track to get your carta de ciudadanía quickly, not much will change. Even though the legal foundation under that track just cracked, the administrative track has not actually delivered anything: to date Migraciones has not granted or rejected a single one of these citizenship applications, and my expectation is that everyone who is in the process at Migraciones will now run to the courts after this ruling (with more chance of success).

Going back through a judge is slower but surer, roughly a two-year process, and some applicants may first need to win a constitutional challenge around the decree, which can add another six to twelve months.

If your case was already a grandfathered court proceeding, this ruling is friendly to you. The whole thrust of the decision is that federal judges, with the prosecutor involved, are the constitutionally correct venue for naturalization. Reassuming jurisdiction is exactly what the court ordered.

A few things this does not unlock, so nobody runs off with the wrong idea. It does not let you naturalize after sitting in the country without legal status; isolated cases have squeaked through, but that is not a path to bet on. I won’t name names, but there have been some shady lawyers who promised that even as an illegal immigrant they could get you citizenship, and one of the most notorious ones who shouted that from the rooftops has actually been disbarred.

It also does not let you file and then live abroad while the process runs on its own, because the courts are expected to want you appearing in person and to check that you actually kept residing in Argentina throughout the process (a summary of your entries and exits is always added to each petition). And the underlying residency rules have not changed at all, so there is nothing to do differently on that front.

None of this is legal advice, and this Mara is a Patagonian rodent in a bowtie, not your lawyer. If you have an active file, talk to counsel who is tracking this case in real time, because the ground is moving, and likely in your favor.

A Golden Visa for Argentina: the tools already exist

Leaving the citizenship by investment angle aside for a moment, the goal behind Milei’s doomed decree (pulling capital and talented people into Argentina) does not need a fragile decree at all.

The residency part of it does not need new law either, since the tools for residency by investment in Argentina already exist in the existing migration law, gathering dust because nobody operationalized them properly.

I have been saying for years that Argentina is the best-value sovereign individual play in the hemisphere if you can stomach the chaos or be detached from it if you earn in dollars and spend in pesos.

The missing piece for a Golden Visa was never the law, but a government willing to make the existing law actually work for the high-net-worth resident it claims to want to attract.

I work with many Buenos Aires immigration lawyers and drafted the whole thing: a plug-and-play residency reform, ready to sign, that could be live the day it hits the Boletín Oficial, the official gazette.

The problem nobody fixed

Argentina has a rentista category (residency for people living off passive income, which is the most used route by far to obtain residency for non-Mercosur citizens) and an inversionista category (residency for investors).

Both have existed for over twenty years, and on paper they are exactly what a country competing for capital should offer. In practice they are a bureaucratic obstacle course that punishes the precise profile Argentina should be courting.

• The rentista track demands proof of periodic passive income, which ignores how most wealthy people actually hold money. If your net worth sits in a brokerage account or a fund that compounds rather than paying you a monthly check, you have been forced to liquidate positions just to show a cash flow you do not need. The system also asks you to wire your money into the country before your residency is approved, which is backwards, because opening a local bank account is practically impossible without having a DNI in hand.

• The inversionista category, on the books since 2003, has no working procedure at all, so the foreigner who just bought an apartment cannot turn that purchase into residency. And the physical-presence rule of six months a year lands hardest on exactly the mobile, internationally connected person whose capital you are trying to attract.

None of these requirements are written into the law, but they are administrative habits installed by past regulations. And regulations are far easier to change than laws.

The Golden Visa fix that needs no decree

The package I am proposing is four reforms, delivered through instruments the executive can sign on its own authority. Here is what changes:

• The rentista track gets a second door: Keep the existing passive-income path (USD 1,500 a month from foreign assets, minimum one year). Add a new path based on global net worth: show USD 250,000 in lawful assets held abroad, of any kind, and you qualify, no proof of monthly yield required. Stocks, funds, real estate, company stakes, bank deposits, even documented savings from your salary all count. That path grants a full three-year residency. The requirement to wire money into the country moves to your first renewal instead of being a gate at the start. Argentine notarial instruments and certified-accountant statements get put on equal footing with foreign paperwork.

• The inversionista track finally works: Hold USD 250,000 in Argentine assets (property, local financial instruments, stakes in Argentine companies, productive ventures) and you get a three-year residency. Or use the partial route: start with 20%, USD 50,000, and commit to completing the investment within one year.

With regards to physical presence, the rigid six-months-in-country rule is replaced by three equivalent tests. You satisfy it if the holder is present 180 days a year, or a household family member is, or, for investors, the qualifying assets remain demonstrably live in the country. Come in on net worth, stay in on investment.

Why this beats what the government already tried

This package creates no new agency, needs no budget line, and depends on no appointments or drawn-out rollout. The residency reforms run entirely through existing authority in Ley 25.871, signed as DNM Disposiciones. They can be in force the day they are published.

Contrast that with what the government actually did: Decree 366/2025 created a brand-new Agencia de Programas de Ciudadanía por Inversión, and that agency has spent months waiting to do anything at all. The decree’s online citizenship procedure took four months to appear and ten months to come with instructions, and is still not working. That is the difference between reform that works on paper and reform that works on Tuesday.

This is deregulation that actually attracts capital, which is supposed to be the entire brand. No hay plata, and one of my main goals is for plata to start arriving in bulk in Argentina, whether it be through a CBI or RBI Golden Visa.

There is also a measurement kicker built in, just like the Portugal Golden Visa program which has been extremely successful: the package requires Migraciones to publish a twice-yearly statistical report, broken down by nationality, asset type, declared capital, and region.

Every approved file becomes a hard data point on how much the world trusts Argentina as a place to live and invest. For a government that loves a good chart, that should sell itself.

All of the proposed reforms are as solid as tungsten: they are administrative reinterpretations of powers Migraciones already has, no new law, no decree, nothing a court can call legislative overreach.

The Plug & Play Golden Visa Text

Below you can find the entire package, every Disposición and the accompanying decree, ready to take off the shelf. It has been shaped with people who run these files for a living. If anyone in a position to move on this wants it, it is done. No consulting engagement to commission, no committee to form. The draft is below. Call us.

The goal is to get this up and running and get a lluvia de inversiones going from foreign investors on an individual basis.

You can read the full proposed text in both Spanish and English. The Spanish version is the operative document, workshopped with experienced immigration practitioners. The English version is a translation for international investors, immigration lawyers, and anyone in the global residency-and-citizenship world who wants to see what a serious Argentine Golden Visa could look like.

Downloads:

• Spanish original: Proyecto de Reforma del Régimen de Residencia (Rentista e Inversionista):

  

  Reforma Residencia Rentistas Inversionistas Es

  116KB ∙ PDF file

  Download

  Download

• English translation: Proposed Argentine Residency Reform (Rentier and Investor):

Proposed Residency Reform Rentier Investor En

23.9KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

If you are weighing Argentina as a base, a second home, or an investment play, this is the framework I would want you operating under, and the one worth pushing the government to adopt. Tell them an internationally mobile gnawer sent you.

See you in the Jungle, anon!

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BowTiedMara covers Argentine macro, real estate, citizenship and residency, and sovereign individual strategy from the ground in Buenos Aires. For 1x1 consultations on residency, citizenship, and investing in Argentina, or to follow along on X and YouTube, see the links below.

• 1x1 Consultations: book a 1x1 consultation for more information about obtaining residency, citizenship or investing in real estate in Argentina here.

• Propertyinbuenosaires.com: personal resource website with everything you need to know about buying and selling property in Argentina.

• ArgInvesting.com: new project — a mini-Bloomberg for Argentina. Live FX, BCRA, inflation and bond data with interactive charts, plus the full Macro Pulse report. Built off the Argentina Macro Pulse you’ve read here.

• X/Twitter: definitely most active here, you can also find me on Instagram but I hardly use that account.

• Podcasts: You can find previous appearances on podcasts etc here.

• YouTube: Check out my channel for real estate info and more.

• WiFi Agency: My other (paid) blog on how to start a digital agency from A to Z.

The government is calling it the largest privatization of the Milei era. What made me put down the mate and read the fine print is that the math doesn’t add up, and the government’s own anti-corruption prosecutor has already raised flags.

For a process the government swears was clean and competitive, a lot of people seem to disagree. Whenever there’s plata and concessions involved in Latin America, things can quickly start to get interesting from an assignment perspective.

So before we get to who really won and why, back up to where this river highway came from. The story of the hidrovía is Argentina in miniature: a strategic asset, a foreign operator, a stack of decrees, and a control body that somehow never gets built.

The Making of a River Highway

A river only becomes a hidrovía once you dredge it, mark it with buoys, and deepen it for big ships, so the whole thing is really a permanent engineering project dressed up as a river.

The modern story starts in the early 1990s. Back then most of the channel sat at barely 26.5 feet of depth, too shallow for grain ships to load full. A half-empty ship still pays full freight (the flete falso, or "false freight"), so the cargo crowd wanted it deeper, and they wanted private operators with dredges to do the work. The national governments along the river lined up financing from the usual suspects: the World Bank, the IDB, CAF, and FONPLATA.

In Argentina the machinery moved through Decree 863/93, signed in April 1993, which opened an international tender to modernize, dredge, and maintain the Argentine trunk of the waterway. The model was a public-works toll concession at the company's own risk, with no state guarantee.

Almost two years later, on February 20, 1995, the government signed with Belgium's Jan de Nul N.V. and Argentina's Emepa S.A. The two folded into a joint venture called Hidrovía S.A. that operated the waterway between 1995 and 2021.

While the dredges ran, the geography of money reorganized itself around them. In a 70 km stretch near Rosario you will now find 29 private port terminals (!) and about 80% of the country's grain-crushing capacity, the densest agro-export cluster in the region. The cheap river freight helped fuel a soy monoculture boom, with everything that comes with it.

In 2024 alone, he grain and soy complex shipping through these terminals generated around US$5.5 billion in export duties for the national government. The transport of these large-scale exports is carried out using Panamax vessels, capable of transporting between 60,000 and 90,000 tons of cargo across the seas. But for those Panamax vessels to be able to navegate the river, it needs to be dredged. This is where Dutch and Belgian dredging companies come in.

Since 2021, the dredging, buoying and signaling of the waterway, as well as toll collection, had been in the hands of the Argentine State through the General Ports Administration, after the government of then-president Alberto Fernández decided not to renew the Hidrovía S.A. concession.

As part of the agreement and through an Executive Order, Fernández created the Federal Waterway Administration State Company, with a 51 percent share of the social capital assigned to the State, and the seven provinces bordering the waterway with 49 percent ownership.

The 2024 Concession Tender

In 2024, the Milei Government called for a national and international public tender for the concession of the Paraguay-Paraná Waterway. The tender, managed by the Undersecretariat of Ports and Waterways, included the modernization, operation, and maintenance of the waterway’s signaling system, as well as dredging and re-dredging.

The tender to grant a private concession for the maintenance and operation of the Waterway was ultimately canceled by the Government itself following strong criticism and the submission of only one bid. This is a pattern that rodent readers will have grown accustomed to as far as important tenders go.

Only one company had made a bid: DEME, a Belgian infrastructure firm that had spent the process alleging the terms were rigged in favor of Jan de Nul, the long-standing incumbent concessionaire, which ultimately did not submit an offer. The government said DEME pressured rivals not to bid. Several international companies denounced irregularities in the tender specifications, arguing that the conditions favored the Belgian company Jan de Nul, which had held the concession for the service since 1995.

The Dutch company Boskalis and the Chinese company Shanghai Dredging also expressed their disagreement; the latter was excluded by a clause that prevented the participation of companies with CCP/State capital.

Criticism also focused on the 30-year duration of the contract and the government’s alleged intention to benefit Jan de Nul as compensation for an undredged debt of approximately $80 million from the defunct General Ports Administration.

Sabotage

Instead of owning up to a badly designed tender, the head of the Ports Agency (ANPYN), Iñaki Arreseygor, told a Chamber of Deputies committee that the tender for the Hidrovía concession was deliberately sabotaged, and he pinned the blame on former president Mauricio Macri and his former transport minister Guillermo Dietrich.

Dietrich pushed back in a statement, saying the tender was badly designed from the start. He argued the 2019 draft terms from the Macri-era had created real competition with shorter terms (not 30 years), and award by lowest price.

Former president Mauricio Macri hit back at the government over the Hidrovía tender, and named Santiago Caputo (Milei's presidential advisor) as the man behind the sabotage accusation leveled at him and Dietrich. This Hidrovía drama signalled the start of an open PRO-vs-Milei rupture over the river, and it would become the flashpoint for the broader Macri-Milei alliance breakdown.

The failed tender was only round one, and what happened on the second attempt is the part the government would rather you not look at too closely.

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The macro story is arguably the cleanest it has looked since this rodent started running these reports. May inflation printed at an 8-month low, S&P joined Moody’s in pulling Argentina back into B territory, country risk fell to levels last seen 8 years ago, and the IMF just handed the government a single number that no other G20 economy can match in 2026.

Read the local press this month, though, and you would think the administration is coming apart at the seams. That gap, between what the numbers say and what the headlines scream, is the whole story of this issue.

Here is what is covered inside:

• The Comeback Numbers: May CPI at a 2.1% MoM 8-month low, an S&P upgrade to B- (Stable), and country risk back under 450 bps. Why the disinflation trend is now structurally locked in, and where the market sees the next print landing.

• The EMAE Record, With an Asterisk: April economic activity hit an all-time historical high. Why the report is telling you to brace for a technical correction anyway, and what that says about a transition that was never going to be linear.

• The IMF’s Killer Stat: The one dual-surplus number that makes Argentina the only G20 nation in its category for 2026, why higher oil prices have flipped from threat to hedge, and the full Fund breakdown (3.5% GDP, end-2026 inflation near 25%, a zero overall fiscal balance).

• Caputo’s 2027 Firewall: How the Economy Ministry is clearing peso maturities early to insulate the program from riesgo kuka (the market’s shorthand for a Peronist comeback) before the election cycle even starts.

• Adorni’s Bitcoin Problem: The USD 200,000 origin story that contradicts his earlier accounts, the legal bet hidden inside it, and why even hardcore LLA supporters now want him gone.

• The Caputo-for-CABA Trial Balloon: Why “Toto’s” name is suddenly surfacing for the capital, and how the Petri-Mendoza move reveals a minister-to-jurisdiction playbook already in motion.

• Rufus-gate: The anonymous X account that savaged the cabinet while praising Karina alone, traced straight back to the President of the Chamber of Deputies. The internal LLA war is now the single biggest threat to the ruling party heading into 2027.

• Mara’s read: The truce month, what the faction war means for capital deployment, and where the real risk (and the real opportunity) sits now.

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The original Tax Innocence regime is a mechanism that seeks to legally “shield” people who incorporate their “mattress dollars” into the formal financial system.

The reform package makes it even broader by removing the income and wealth caps entirely, so nearly anyone can join the simplified Ganancias regime, with only the largest national taxpayers locked out of the benefits. ARCA’s hands also get tied further: the agency will only be allowed to build a case on what you declared, what already sits in its own systems, or what third parties reported.

The previous Tax Innocence law is barely three months old, but Caputo and Co. clearly want to make it even easier for people to spend their undeclared funds without the fiscal authority breathing down their necks. The initiative filed in February was discussed in detail in The Age of Tax Innocence, and the modifications proposed by the Milei government this week will make the regime even more flexible.

All this comes on top of the initial blanqueo or tax amnesty, which made it possible to “launder” up to 100k of undeclared funds at a rate of 0% — anything over 100k would have a 5% rate—, which was enacted in Q4 2024.

Needless to say that the search for saving dollars continues, as a primary vehicle for local investment into the Argentine economy as FDI still remains relatively low outside of RIGI sectors.

Find the full breakdown of Tax Innocence 2.0 and whether cash real estate deals are now living on borrowed time below.

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The city is still closing thousands of deals a month, but the credit that was supposed to take the number of deals to new highs has all but vanished.

That gap is the whole story this month. Mortgage issuance was the engine behind 2025’s transaction recovery, and that engine is now running on fumes, with private banks almost entirely out of the game.

The market is holding up anyway, which tells you something about who is really buying in Buenos Aires: people sitting on dollars rather than people waiting on a loan approval. There is also a new REIT-style vehicle worth a look for anyone who wants property exposure in Buenos Aires without buying a whole apartment.

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Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of starting and running a company in Argentina, whether an SRL, S.A. or SaS — I have personally had the honor of running all three at certain stages, before deciding that none of them beats the good old monotributo for what I was trying to achieve — will be familiar with the endless frustrations that go along with it. Besides potential law suits from employees just for the sake of it (since according to the Argentine justice system, the employee is always right), to filing requirements that eat up a decent chunk of the revenue in accountant fees alone, the headaches in Argentina tend to be much larger than in most other jurisdictions.

One element is the objetivo of the company: what will the company service / produce? Up until this day, this company description has to be defined very narrowly in the operating agreement and founding documents, and is legally binding. This often results in company activity descriptions that range from space travel to selling candy in a kiosko, just to be safe that all potential use cases of the company are covered without having to amend the company documents at a later stage.

With the new proposed changes to the company law, that will be a thing of the past, together with a range of other modifications. Find an overview of the most important changes below, together with a closer look on Peter Thiel’s decision to settle in Argentina.

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When most people think of Swiss influence in Argentina, the mind drifts to chocolate in Bariloche, watchmakers in Recoleta, or the alpine roofs of Villa General Belgrano. The Soldati story runs in the opposite direction.

A young man from Ticino arrives in Buenos Aires in 1888 with no capital and a brother working behind the counter at a drugstore in San Telmo, and within two decades he is founding two barrios at the southern edge of the city, naming one after his hometown and the other after himself.

Giuseppe Ferdinando Francisco Soldati

The story the future founder of the Villa Lugano and Villa Soldati neighborhoods starts in May 1864, right when the Paraguayan War (1864-1870) was heating up in the Southern Cone.

Giuseppe Ferdinando Francisco Soldati was born in Neggio, the Italian part of Switzerland, in the canton of Ticino, very close to Lugano.

At 21, he traveled to the United States seeking new horizons and opportunities, but he didn’t fare well financially and decided to return to Switzerland. His brother, Francisco Silvio, a talented businessman, was already in Argentina, where he worked at “Droguería La Estrella,” as a trusted employee of the De Marchi family, the owners. Francisco Silvio encouraged his brother to travel to Argentina, where he saw more direct opportunities for his brother.

Finally, in 1888, Giuseppe Soldati departed from the Port of Genoa on the transatlantic ship “Savoie” bound for the Rio de la Plata, arriving in Buenos Aires on December 9. From here on out he became known as “José”, the Spanish equivalent of the Italian Giuseppe.

José Soldati began working at the same drugstore alonside his brother, which remains located (as a pharmacy) on the corner of Adolfo Alsina and Defensa streets to this day.

In 1898, the owners of the drugstore (the De Marchi family), decided to reward their most qualified and long-serving employees by transferring its management, who formed the partnership “Soldati, Craveri y Tagliabue.”

From this successful business venture also emerged the drugstore “La Inglesa,” which would have branches in Rosario and Bahía Blanca. Among other business activities, Soldati partnered with other prominent families from Ticino, such as the Devoto family, in the “Nuevo Banco Italiano.” He also owned ranches in the provinces of Buenos Aires and La Pampa.

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This May report is, in two words: politically loaded. The macro story is steady (a soft patch in February, inflation back to its lowest level in months, exports breaking records, and a Fitch upgrade that takes Argentina back into B territory for the first time since 2019), but the real signal in this issue is political.

The 2027 candidate selection drama inside La Libertad Avanza is getting visible, Bullrich just planted her flag in CABA, and there is a quiet structural crack opening up in the libertarian base around Provincia de Buenos Aires that the press will not be reporting on. If you only read one part of this issue, that is the part to read.

Here is what is covered inside:

• The Bad: Why the February EMAE print came in soft, and why it is the lagging cost of last year’s electoral noise rather than a new trend.

• The Good: April CPI back to its lowest level in months, the four factors behind the move, and why the downward trend is structurally locked in.

• The Rating Upgrade: Fitch’s move to B-, why the B-tier matters, and what it changes for institutional capital allocation.

• CABA’s RIGI and RIMI: The city of Buenos Aires’s investment regimes just passed, opening a new doorway for foreign capital between USD 100k and large-cap projects.

• Adorni Down, Bullrich Up: Where the 2027 CABA race actually stands after a scandal that this rodent flagged as a House of Cards setup last month.

• The Provincia de Buenos Aires Fracture: The internal libertarian dispute the press is not covering, why it matters for 2027, and what it tells you about the structural stress inside LLA.

• The Candidate Trade-Off: Proprietary but weak versus electorally strong but less controllable. The Godfather problem Karina Milei has to resolve.

• Mara’s read: Real estate, CBI timing, ARS exposure, and what the political signal means for capital deployment over the next 18 months.

Here we go.

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But before we do, let’s go over an update of the latest telenovela around Manuel Adorni, Milei’s preferred candidate for the Buenos Aires city governor and potential successor after a second term.

Last month’s Argentina Macro Pulse discussed the origins of lamestream media discussing where Adorni got the cash from to paint his bathroom; there’s a bit more to it than that, but compared to other corruption scandals like the SIRA corruption case (an ongoing investigation into the untraceable withdrawal of at least US$530 million in cash from currency exchange houses and imports using the SIRA system in 2023 for US$73 billion), Adorni’s numbers really do not justify 24/7 media coverage:

The move is clear: weaken the inner circle of Milei to try to impede its territorial advancement. It is important to bear in mind that Adorni won the CABA legislative midterm election last May, and then Milei’s party won again by a huge margin in October.

Another interesting data point is that something similar happened last year with another high-profile candidate from Milei’s inner circle: Jose Luis Espert. He was running for another high-caliber district (Provincia de Buenos Aires), and was also torpedoed in the media with an alleged case, linking a 2019 campaign with a narco-donor.

Despite the factual base, whether this has legal grounds or not, it seems like some people are very worried every time Milei’s inner circle eyes high-caliber districts.

Profe José Luis Espert's closet skeletons turned out to be too alive for him to continue in the governor race. He had to bail. Since then, no legal action has been taken against him, which suggests the allegations probably wouldn't have held up in court (or were merely a tool to get rid of him). The Adorni media frenzy around his home, swimming pool fountain and remodeled bathroom tastes fairly similar.

The Milei Siblings Vouch for Adorni

President Javier Milei and his sister, Secretary General Karina Milei, have already made the political decision to keep Manuel Adorni in his position as Chief of Staff, despite the investigation for alleged illicit enrichment and the rumors of his replacement.

This weekend, President Milei confirmed once more that his support for Adorni was unconditional:

“I’m not going to throw him [Adorni] under the bus to win the election.”

Milei’s renewed defense of Adorni came as internal criticism mounted against his Chief of Staff, who repeatedly avoided publicly explaining where he got the US tokens for his assets. It looks like he will not be withdrawing their support from Adorni’s candidacy for city governor any time soon, which could be a costly decision depending on public opinion.

Nearly 60 days after the controversy began, various factions and levels within the ruling party suggest that the case is taking a heavy toll on others in the La Libertad Avanza circle. Within the government, only Senator Patricia Bullrich directly expressed this discontent, pressuring Adorni to “immediately” submit his sworn statement of assets to stop “bogging down” the administration.

Bullrich pressured Adorni on A24 to submit his sworn statement "immediately," saying he needs to "make an effort to end this as soon as possible," and that if the numbers check out everyone else can drop the subject; if not, the courts will sort it.

According to President Milei, Adorni will present the numbers Bullrich was alluding to, and everything will be done and dusted. The opposition does not seem convinced that this will be the case. Anyhow, it is another dent in the political structure of La Libertad Avanza, and this story still has legs. We will see where it ends in the upcoming months.

Presi-Dante?

In the midst of the Adorni media frenzy, a first push was made to install a “new” face ahead of the 2027 elections: Dante Gebel.

People would be hard-pressed to find a more unnatural and forced insertion into candidacy than has been the case here: unlike Milei who gradually moved from TV to social media to politics, Dante Gebel, at least in my personal social media circle, seems to come absolutely out of nowhere.

It was pretty impressive to see how all big channels and newspapers were suddenly talking about a potential presidential candidate. The funding must have been massive. So who is behind this evangelical pastor, who doesn’t even live in Argentina? Let’s find out.

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Deeds are up 17.8% year-on-year at 5,590 records, and we are crawling back toward the 6,000 deeds/month baseline that prevailed before the October midterms threw cold water on the mortgage pipeline. The two-month digestion of the BCRA's encajes hangover looks like it is finally working its way out of the system.

There is a lot more going on under the surface. Listing prices barely moved (one US token above February in CABA for March), pozo developers are still quietly raising prices on new launches, newly launched square meters are down 40% year-on-year, and Sturzenegger is loading up another deregulation bill that should arrive in Congress in June to gut real estate brokerage middlemen.

Plus, this rodent finally heard back from the silent developer mentioned in last month's update, and the explanation for the construction delays is peak Argentine clown show.

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After the international tender to design the CBI was killed two weeks ago (covered here in Argentina Just Killed the CBI Tender), I ended that piece with a line worth repeating:

The door to the Argentine passport is technically open. Practically, nobody is at the desk.

Well, somebody is now at the desk. Congratulations to Aixa Granara on the appointment, and good luck. The job in front of her is a serious one and the clock has been running for almost a year already.

A Quick Recap

For anyone just tuning in, the short version is in three previous articles:

• Argentina’s 5,000-Slot Citizenship Gold Rush, where the original tender was launched and we walked through it completely.

• Argentina’s Citizenship Gold Rush, covering the six firms that submitted bids in January.

• Argentina Just Killed the CBI Tender, covering the April 14 cancellation.

The state of play right now is this: Milei’s original Executive Order 366/2025 from May 2025 created the legal structure for the APCI agency and Argentine CBI as a concept.

That decree is still in force, even though the master tender that was supposed to outsource the design and operation of the program to a single international firm was killed this month, which also undid the outsourcing of the design and operation of the program to a single international firm.

That tender attracted six bids, two finalists, and a $50,000 vs. $25 million pricing gap so wide that the Ministry of Economy chose to kill the entire process rather than award to either side.

Now the agency has its first Executive Director. What the agency does not have is a regulation, an operating procedure, an investment threshold, or an open application window. Until those program requirements are in place, no CBI applications can be processed.

That is what needs to change quickly.

The 5,000-Slot Cap Is Gone

Here is the underreported point that almost nobody in the IMI space has picked up on. The 5,000-application cap on the Argentine CBI program was a feature of the cancelled tender, not of the underlying decree.

Look at the original tender language we quoted in the 5,000-slot article:

Processing up to 5,000 applications, with the contractor issuing “circumstantiated reports” recommending approvals. The contract lasts 4 years from the start date or until 5,000 approval reports are issued by APCI, whichever comes first.

That cap was contractual: it was the maximum number of applications the master agent was being hired to process over the four-year contract window. With the tender cancelled, that cap died with it.

That changes the math significantly. Forbes, in a September 2025 article, already flagged that Argentina could outperform Turkey and Malta on volume. Turkey reached 40,000 CBI applications in roughly five to six years. Dominica passed 30,000 in four years. The US EB-5 visa, which gives residency rather than citizenship, runs above 9,000 applications per year with multi-year waits.

If Argentina handles the regulatory side properly and pulls 5,000 applications a year, that is a potential USD 2.5 billion in foreign direct investment annually at the USD 500,000 minimum. If the program even approaches Turkish-level volumes, the numbers get a lot more interesting than that.

Now that the cap is technically lifted, the real question is whether the new regulation will reintroduce one, or let the market decide. The answer should be the second.

The “Poco Serio” Problem

There is a Spanish phrase that captures the issue here better than anything in English: poco serio. It translates roughly to “not serious” but carries a specific weight when used about institutions or governments. It is the polite way of saying “amateur hour.”

Eleven months have passed since Decree 366/2025 was signed in May 2025.

In that time, the Argentine CBI program has not received a single application, because there is no regulation, no published investment threshold, no open file procedure, no nothing.

To the international investor community, this is starting to feel poco serio. I have spoken to several potential investors over the last few months who have stopped asking when the program will open and started asking whether they should bother waiting for it at all. Argentina is competing for capital with Turkey, Malta, the Caribbean programs, EB-5 in the United States, and a handful of European Golden Visas. The longer this takes, the more capital ends up parked elsewhere.

The fiscal residency piece, which we covered in Argentina CBI Fiscal Residency Solution, is already in place. The labor reform fixed the tax-residency-by-naturalization problem, but what is missing is the regulation that turns the decree into a working program.

There is one piece of good news on the parallel naturalization track. In the last two weeks, immigration lawyers in Buenos Aires have started reporting that Migraciones is actually setting up the kiosko for regular citizenship applications, the one that was supposed to exist a year ago when Decree 366/2025 moved processing from the federal courts to Migraciones.

That is real progress on regular naturalization, but now the CBI side needs to catch up.

What a Serious CBI Regulation Should Look Like

Behind the scenes, this rodent has been working with experienced immigration experts on a proposed text for the CBI regulation. The full draft is downloadable below, in both Spanish and English.

Rather than a boring walk through for every one of the 30+ articles, I will point out a few of the most important proposed articles, and explain the reasoning behind each.

Categories of investment with clear thresholds

The proposed regulation defines seven investment categories. The amounts are calibrated to international comparables and to the specific behaviors the program should incentivize:

The category structure does the work that a well-designed program should do. It pulls capital toward new construction and productive projects (lower thresholds for joint ventures with Argentine companies and non-profits) and away from passive secondary-market real estate flips.

The requirement that real estate be “new”, defined as construction with municipal permits dated after January 1, 2024, blocks resale arbitrage and indirectly prohibits raw rural land purchases, sidestepping the political nightmare of “the gringos are buying our land.”

Who can apply

The proposed regulation lets nationals of countries whose citizens do not require a visa to enter Argentina apply directly from inside the country. The category is designed to invite most of the OECD plus the Caribbean and Latin America to look at Argentine investment opportunities, with the door already open and the paperwork already simple.

For nationals of countries that do require an Argentine visa, the proposal includes a consular track. They can apply for the CBI through the Argentine embassy in their jurisdiction with a fully documented investment project and the corresponding fees. If approved, they receive a business visa to enter Argentina and execute the investment. This keeps the door open for serious investors from anywhere in the world without compromising the visa-waiver-country structure.

This is not a new criterion. It is already used elsewhere in Argentine migration law, and the proposal is aligned with the direction of recent regulation in this area, including Disposición 1520/2024 on category-change requests inside the country.

Family inclusion without re-paying the full investment

The proposal extends CBI to the principal applicant’s spouse or partner, minor children, dependent adult children up to age 25 if studying, and dependent parents over 55. No additional investment is required per family member, only the individual processing fees. The Agency retains the right to set additional fees or top-up investments for specific categories of dependents.

This matters because every serious CBI program in the world operates this way. Forcing a USD 500,000 investment per family member would price the program out of the market and make Argentina look like a country that does not understand how this industry works.

Three-year fund permanence with 30% upfront

The investment must remain in the country for three years from the date of application. The applicant can open the file with 30% of the funds already deposited and committed, with the file held at the Agency until 100% of the investment is verified. Only then is it sent to DNM for the actual citizenship grant.

Three years is the international standard. The 30% rule lets serious investors start the clock without parking the full amount on day one, while protecting the program from straw-man transfers.

The anti-fraud article

Article 20 of the proposal is the single most important piece of fraud protection in the entire text. It explicitly prohibits any operation in which the receiver of the investment commits, expressly or tacitly, to return the funds to the applicant without the actual execution of the investment plan. The text of this article must be transcribed verbatim into the investment contract, under penalty of the file being rejected.

This is the article that prevents the obvious scam: paying USD 100,000 to a property owner to “sell” you a USD 500,000 apartment that gets quietly bought back six months later. Every CBI program in the world has seen this exact maneuver. The Argentine version preempts it at the contract level.

Pre-approval regime for projects

The proposal creates a voluntary pre-approval registry where Argentine companies can submit investment projects to APCI in advance, pay a fee, and receive a certificate of pre-approval. Projects under USD 5 million get a six-month certificate; projects above that get up to a year. Renewable.

This serves three purposes at once. It gives investors confidence that the project they are putting money into has already been reviewed by the Agency. It reduces APCI’s per-applicant workload because the receiving entity has already been vetted. And it generates additional fee revenue for the Agency. Mid-size and large Argentine companies can actively seek out CBI capital with a credible certificate in hand, federalizing the investment flow beyond Recoleta and Puerto Madero.

Investment Responsibles with annual reporting

Every project that receives CBI capital must designate one or more “Responsables de la Inversión,” senior people inside the receiving company who are legally accountable for the execution of the investment. They notify APCI of any breach, file a detailed investment plan per applicant, and submit annual reports on the use of funds for the first three years. They are jointly liable for damages from any breach.

This is the accountability backbone that the Caribbean programs have historically lacked and that the Maltese program has been hammered for. Putting a named, legally exposed individual on the receiving side prevents the “the developer disappeared with the money” scenario that has burned investors in other jurisdictions.

Constitutional and Reputational Guardrails

A few of the design choices above deserve a second mention because they protect the program politically as much as legally.

Article 25 of the Argentine Constitution explicitly mandates the encouragement of foreign immigration of those who come to “labor the land, improve industries, and introduce and teach the sciences and arts.” A well-designed CBI regulation answers that mandate directly. This is not a controversial constitutional reading. It is the explicit text.

The visa-waiver-country criterion protects the strength of the Argentine passport. Argentina is currently in active negotiations for entry into the US Visa Waiver Program. A CBI program open to anyone with USD 500,000 would jeopardize those negotiations overnight, and could also complicate EU Schengen access.

The proposed criterion keeps the door closed to the kind of citizenship arbitrage that has triggered EU and US sanctions against several Caribbean programs over the last decade (EU canceled visa-free entry for Vanuatu, mainly due to CBI price concerns, and hinted that Caribbean CBI islands better increase their investment thresholds to maintain visa-free entry, which they promptly did).

The three-year fund hold and the Article 20 anti-fraud language protect the Argentine state from the “we sold our passport to anyone” perception that has haunted Malta, Cyprus, and several other programs. The federalization of investment, baked into the Category V joint-venture structure with Argentine companies, keeps the program from becoming a Recoleta and Puerto Madero subsidy.

These are not bureaucratic flourishes, but the difference between a program that survives the next election cycle and one that gets unwound by the next administration.

Downloads

The full proposed regulatory text is available below in both Spanish and English. The Spanish version is the document that has been workshopped with experienced immigration experts and is the operative text. The English version is a translation provided for the benefit of international investors, immigration lawyers, and anyone in the global RCBI community who wants to understand what a serious Argentine CBI regulation could look like.

Spanish Original:

Proyecto Reglamento Cbi Argentina Es

24.9KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

English Translation:

Proposed Cbi Regulation Argentina En

23KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

If you are a policymaker at MECON, Migraciones, or APCI, take this as a starting point. The document is a structured proposal that can be modified, expanded, or rejected on its merits. Nothing in it is take-it-or-leave-it. The point is to give the agency something concrete to react to, rather than starting from a blank page after eleven months of stasis.

The Ask

I have worked in the residency and citizenship by investment industry for 10+ years and have been a resident in Argentina for over 20. The motivation here is simple: this country needs this CBI program to succeed, and it needs to launch quickly.

To Minister Caputo and to Aixa Granara: the proposal is on the table. Happy to walk through any section, discuss alternative structures, or connect you with the immigration experts who helped draft it. No fees, no compensation, no agenda beyond seeing this program work.

The door is open and somebody is finally at the desk. The 5,000-slot cap is gone with the dead tender, and the fiscal residency rules are in place. The naturalization kiosko at Migraciones is finally being set up. The pieces are coming together.

What is left is the regulation. Let’s get it done.

See you in the CBI Jungle, anons!

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Other ways to get in touch:

• 1x1 Consultations: book a 1x1 consultation for more information about obtaining residency, citizenship or investing in real estate in Argentina here.

• Propertyinbuenosaires.com: personal resource website with everything you need to know about buying and selling property in Argentina.

• X/Twitter: definitely most active here, you can also find me on Instagram but I hardly use that account.

• Podcasts: You can find previous appearances on podcasts etc here.

• YouTube: Check out my channel for real estate info and more.

• WiFi Agency: My other (paid) blog on how to start a digital agency from A to Z.

“The only chance of survival, when one is sincerely in love, is to conceal it from the woman one loves, to feign a slight detachment in all circumstances.”

— Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island

Short History

One way to get ensured engagement for farming Musk Bucks on X, is mentioning anything related to the Falkland Islands, or Islas Malvinas as they are called in Argentina. Even the mere mention of the word “Falklands” is enough to make many an Argentine netizen’s blood boil up to the point where a comment to dispute that term is no longer optional, but a necessity: they are called Malvinas.

For the rest of this article I will switch back and forth between these names, because as charged as they may be, they do not seize to be just that: names for two islands in the Argentine Sea.

The United Provinces without a Kingdom already discussed the claim to the islands from both sides briefly. In the words of the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

On January 3, 1833, the Falklands were illegally occupied by British forces who evicted the population and the Argentine authorities legitimately established there, replacing them with British subjects who since then established restrictive measures to prevent the resettlement of Argentines.

According to the British, the islands were discovered by an English sailor in 1592 and then competed with Spain for sovereignty. In practice, the Falklands were a no man’s islands ready for the taking and it wasn’t hard to get rid of the Argentine control that was there at the time. Finally in 1833 the United Kingdom expelled the Argentine governor and the garrison, forcibly taking control of the islands to the present day.

The fact that there was even an Argentine governor and garrison to begin with, along with the recent discovery of a formal request from an English captain to Buenos Aires to operate in the archipelago in 1813, kind of blows a bit of a hole in the British historical narrative and strengthens the Argentine case.

Argentina never abandoned its claim for sovereignty over the islands, and after taking the issue to the UN Special Committee on Decolonization, it managed to start negotiations with the United Kingdom through UN resolution 1514 of 1960. Unfortunately, negotiations went nowhere.

The British effective control over the islands since 1833 means that most of the Kelper population on the islands is British, and this is usually the main argument for keeping it that way: “the population on the islands do not want to join Argentina”.

In 2013, with Argentina pushing again for sovereignty talks, the islanders held a referendum on whether to stay a British Overseas Territory. Turnout hit 92%, and 99.8% voted to keep things exactly as they were. Three people voted against. Three.

For Argentina, this referendum and the justification of the will of Falkland residents is a non-argument since the population on the islands is viewed as a foreign occupation that was installed to maintain control over them, not a legitimate population.

The 1982 War

Without picking sides, it is clear that the side that holds on to the claim more firmly and with more heartfelt emotion is Argentina, so much so that it was willing to start a war in 1982 to try to recover the islands.

In hindsight the Falklands War would prove to be unfortunate, not just for the lives lost or the timing — the military dictatorship needed a “win” and more popular support, and decided that the Malvinas War was the best way to do so — but also with regards to the broader communication, flights and commerce between the islands and Argentina.

The Malvinas of the 1970s were a forgotten wool outpost, not the prosperous little enclave they like to show today. The local economy was stagnant, population was shrinking, and the islands leaned heavily on Argentina for the basics. Direct flights from the mainland, fuel shipments, and even teachers crossed from the continent under commercial arrangements that Buenos Aires and London had quietly worked out.

By the early 80s, without that lifeline or a serious plan from the UK, the islands were staring at economic collapse. This was a place that needed a war to become viable, lol.

After Galtieri handed London the perfect excuse to pour money in, Britain rebuilt and modernized the islands at scale, with the crown jewel being the Mount Pleasant military airbase.

In 1987 they drew their own Exclusive Economic Zone and started selling fishing licenses to foreign fleets, mostly for squid, which quickly outgrew wool as the main export. GDP per capita jumped into the same bracket as Norway or Switzerland, and unemployment in recent years has sat below 1%. Not bad for a few thousand people on a windswept rock.

For Argentina, the war was a financial disaster on top of a military one. It piled unpayable debt on a country already unraveling, and inflation blew past 200% in 1982 and would climb all the way to over 5,000% around 1989. Any direct commercial link between the continent and the islands was cut, and it has barely recovered since. A rare case where losing a war also meant losing the customer.

Milei’s Vision

This loss of integration with the mainland after the 1982 war makes a Hong Kong-style return of the islands less likely, despite the fact that there is also a minority of Argentine nationals living on the islands.

Even before his presidential campaign, President Javier Milei has always advocated for a solution with those characteristics, and has maintained that stance throughout his presidency:

“We claim sovereignty over the islands. We consider the Malvinas Islands to be Argentine (…) and they are being occupied by the United Kingdom. And we believe that this must be resolved through diplomatic channels, using the model that China employed in the case of Hong Kong.”

Internationally, President Milei reasserted Argentinian sovereignty over the Malvinas immediately after the UK gave up Diego Garcia. For the first time in centuries, no country in Europe is in a position to project hard power globally, and as of late, the diplomatic channels seem to be in Argentina’s favor.

In the most recent Ministerial ZOPACAS Meeting, Argentina highlights the renewed international backing received for its claim of sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands:

On April 10, 2026, the Argentine Republic thanks the member states of the Zone of Peace and Cooperation of the South Atlantic (ZOPACAS)—a group of 24 countries from South America and West Africa—for their firm and renewed backing of Argentina’s position on the Malvinas Question. This support was clearly reaffirmed in the Rio Declaration adopted at the IX Ministerial Meeting held in Rio de Janeiro on April 8–9.

This endorsement demonstrates a consistent and solid regional consensus in favor of Argentina’s sovereign rights, respect for our territorial integrity, and the peaceful settlement of disputes. It also confirms the shared commitment to keeping the South Atlantic a zone of peace, cooperation, and stability.

In the Declaration, the member states once again called for the immediate resumption of negotiations between the Argentine Government and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in line with United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2065 (XX) and other relevant UN resolutions, with the goal of reaching a peaceful, just, and lasting solution to the sovereignty dispute as soon as possible.

During the Falklands War, Pinochet’s Chile provided crucial logistics support to the British, which was essential to the British war efforts. The fact that Chile’s President Antonio Kast has now also voiced his support for Argentine sovereignty of the islands, is a telling sign of momentum building up for Argentina’s claim:

During his first international trip since taking office, Kast reaffirmed Chile’s support for Argentina’s “legitimate sovereign rights” over the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, the South Sandwich Islands and their maritime spaces, according to a joint statement from the foreign ministries of Chile and Argentina.

History and population claims aside, what actually makes these islands valuable, and why is this suddenly back on Argentina's front burner?

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Most of you reading this have been following the CBI saga for months. If you haven’t, the short version is in Argentina’s Citizenship Gold Rush and Argentina CBI Fiscal Residency Solution. The program was supposed to be Argentina’s first formal investor citizenship route, run by a new agency called the APCI under the Ministry of Economy, capped at 5,000 approvals over four years.

That program, as designed, is now dead. Here we go.

What the resolution says

You can download the official resolution here:

Rs 2026 37468010 Apn Mec

116KB ∙ PDF file

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The official document (RESOL-2026-522-APN-MEC) cancels Concurso Público N° 34-0001-CPU25, the international tender that was supposed to pick the consulting firm to design, launch and run the entire CBI operation.

Six firms bid back in January 2026. By March, the Evaluation Commission had recommended a winner. By April, the whole thing was in the bin.

The reason given in the resolution is masterful jerga oficial:

“...subsisten divergencias relevantes en cuanto a los enfoques propuestos y su adecuación integral a los objetivos de la política pública a desarrollar.”

Translated: relevant divergences persist regarding the proposed approaches and their integral adequacy to the public policy objectives being developed.

In plain English: the bids didn’t actually match what the government needs. So they killed the tender, returned the bid guarantees, and walked away. No compensation owed to anyone. Article 20 of Decree 1023/2001 lets them do exactly this.

The Bidders, and why most of them got tossed

Six firms showed up at the January 20 opening:

1. Hong Kong Qian Cheng Business Co., Ltd. (China)

2. Latitude Consultancy Malta Limited

3. Salzburg International for Law LLC (Reach Immigration)

4. Ancova Associates FZCO (UAE)

5. Henley & Partners Immigration Services FZCO

6. Asesorías Legal Advisor Limitada (Chile)

Four of them were eliminated before the real evaluation even started:

• Hong Kong Qian Cheng wired its $1.25M bid guarantee into its own account at China Construction Bank instead of the Banco Nación account specified in the pliego. The funds arrived ten days late. Disqualified.

• Salzburg International uploaded a SWIFT bank guarantee to the COMPR.AR system but never delivered the physical document with proper translation and certification. Disqualified.

• Latitude Consultancy failed the financial solvency tests. Indebtedness ratio came in at 1.36 against a maximum of 0.50. Solvency ratio was 1.73 against a minimum of 2.00. Numbers do not lie.

• Ancova Associates submitted a “Rectification of the Technical and Financial Proposal” when asked for clarifications, which the evaluators ruled was a modification of their original bid. Argentine procurement law has a principle called inmodificabilidad de las ofertas. You cannot change your bid after submission. Disqualified.

That left two finalists: Henley & Partners and Asesorías Legal Advisor Limitada.

The Chilean front

Now here is where it gets interesting. The Chilean firm was not really a Chilean law firm doing this alone. It was the legal vehicle for a four-firm international consortium operating under the structure Asesorías Legal Advisor Limitada – UT Consorcio AAPA. The “UT” stands for Unión Transitoria (temporary joint venture) and AAPA is the acronym of the four firms involved.

Per IMI Daily’s reporting on the March 5 evaluation report, the four firms behind the Chilean shell were:

• Apex Capital Partners

• AIM Global

• Passport Legacy

• Arton Capital

A consortium of four investment migration firms, fronted by a Chilean limitada to clear local procurement requirements. Smart structure. Probably saved them weeks of paperwork. Until it didn’t.

The Bid Gap

Both finalists looked roughly equal on paper. Henley & Partners and the Chilean-fronted consortium scored identically on the technical evaluation, until the envelopes with the prices came out.

As noted in the IMI Daily article, the bids diverged quite a bit:

Where the bids diverged was in price. The economic evaluation, weighted at 40% of the total score, overwhelmed Henley’s position.

The consortium bid $10,000 per tranche across all five tranches of 1,000 applications each, totaling $50,000 for the entire contract. Henley bid $2 million for the first tranche, escalating to $8 million for the fifth, totaling $25 million.

So much so that the spread was 500x between the two:

That is not a typo. The consortium offered to design, launch, promote and run Argentina’s entire CBI program for four years for fifty thousand US tokens. Henley wanted twenty-five million.

So either the consortium was promising to do the job for less than the cost of a used Toyota Hilux in Palermo, or Henley was charging Argentine government rates because they assumed Argentina would pay them. Neither read flatters anyone involved.

The math from there was a formality. The consortium won the price round by such a wide margin that nothing else mattered. They walked away with the recommendation, Henley filed an impugnación, and somebody at MECON finally sat down and asked what fifty thousand dollars actually buys you when you’re trying to attract five thousand millionaires to a country like Argentina.

The answer, apparently, was: not enough.

Why the government walked away

Read the timeline carefully:

• March 5, 2026: Evaluation Commission recommends awarding to the consortium.

• March-April 2026: Henley & Partners and Latitude both file impugnaciones (formal legal challenges) to the award.

• April 14, 2026: Minister Caputo signs a resolution killing the entire tender, citing “strategic and policy concerns.”

The resolution does not say it directly, but the pattern is obvious: after the impugnaciones came in, the Legal and Administrative Secretariat of the Ministry took another look at the actual proposals.

Their conclusion, per the official text, was that “the continuity of the procedure under the current conditions could not ensure the degree of coherence, integrality and strategic articulation required for the adequate implementation of the program.”

Translation: somebody finally read the consortium’s $50,000 bid and asked the obvious question. What do you actually get for fifty grand? A program that processes 5,000 millionaire applicants and is supposed to attract billions in foreign investment, run on the budget of a midsize wedding. The answer was clearly not enough. Probably no marketing infrastructure, no global outreach budget, no due diligence apparatus that could survive an FATF audit.

Henley’s $25M bid was almost certainly closer to or slightly above what running a real CBI program actually costs. They have run programs in St. Kitts, Malta, Grenada, Dominica, Antigua, and at least three other jurisdictions since 2017. They know what the line items look like.

So the government had two bad options:

1. Award the contract to the cheap bidder, watch the program fail to launch properly, and eat the political cost.

2. Award the contract to Henley at $25M, get hammered for awarding a no-bid premium contract to a foreign multinational after a process that recommended someone else.

They chose option three: kill the whole thing and start over. Or maybe not start over at all and just build it in-house through APCI directly. That part is still unclear.

Some Important Sidenotes

A few things to keep in mind before drawing conclusions:

The CBI program itself is not dead. Decree 524/2025 still exists. The legal framework for the APCI agency that will control the CBI applications still exists. What just died is the specific tender for the master consultant who was supposed to build the program. The government can issue a new tender, restructure the procurement, or build the operational capacity in-house through APCI directly.

This is not a policy reversal. Nothing in the resolution says Milei is backing away from CBI as a concept. The opposite, actually. The reasoning is about getting the implementation right, not about questioning the goal.

There is a procedural appeal window. Bidders have 20 business days to file a recurso de reconsideración or 30 days for a recurso jerárquico. The Chilean consortium can challenge this. Whether they will, given the cost of fighting the Argentine state and the slim odds of reversing a Ministerial signature, is a different question. This Mara would be surprised if anyone bothers to deal with that, and it would probably not reach an outcome before the end of Milei’s first term, knowing the snail pace of the Argentine justice system.

The timeline just got pushed back significantly. Anyone who was expecting the CBI program to actually open for applications in 2026 should adjust their expectations. New tender, new evaluation, new appeals window, new contract negotiations, or maybe the government will decide to structure the whole thing in-house. We are probably looking at Q4 2026 at the earliest for a relaunch, and that assumes everything moves quickly. Argentine bureaucracy does not move quickly.

Final Thoughts

Argentina just demonstrated something pretty important about how the Milei government handles procurement. The standard Latin American playbook would have been to let the cheap bid win, sign the contract, watch the program fail in slow motion over 18 months, blame the consultant, and move on. That is the South American baseline and we have all seen that movie.

Instead, somebody at MECON read the bids, did the math, and concluded that the cheapest option was not viable. They then killed the process and accepted the political cost rather than ship a broken product. That is not how things normally work here. It could even be a small but real signal that the institutional DNA at the Ministry of Economy is changing.

Whether the next iteration of the CBI tender produces a workable program is a separate question. But the fact that this one got killed before launch instead of after is, in Argentine context, almost an upgrade.

This rodent will be watching for the next tender announcement. When it comes, the structure will tell you everything about whether the government has actually learned anything. If the new pliego requires bidders to demonstrate global marketing capacity, if it sets minimum operational budgets, if it weights track record more heavily than raw price, then somebody at MECON paid attention. If the new tender just relaunches the same structure with the same scoring criteria, expect the same outcome.

For now, the citizenship gold rush is on pause. And it is not the only route that's frozen. Decree 366/2025 from May last year moved naturalization processing from the federal courts to Migraciones (DNM). Almost a year later, the kiosko at Migraciones still does not exist. No new applications have been processed since the decree, and the only cases moving are the grandfathered ones still sitting on judges' desks from before the handover.

So as of right now: no working CBI tender, no functioning naturalization pipeline, and no clear timeline for either. The door to the Argentine passport is technically open. Practically, nobody is at the desk.

See you in the Jungle, anon!

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• 1x1 Consultations: book a 1x1 consultation for more information about obtaining residency, citizenship or investing in real estate in Argentina here.

• Propertyinbuenosaires.com: personal resource website with everything you need to know about buying and selling property in Argentina.

• X/Twitter: definitely most active here, you can also find me on Instagram but I hardly use that account.

• Podcasts: You can find previous appearances on podcasts etc here.

• YouTube: Check out my channel for real estate info and more.

• WiFi Agency: My other (paid) blog on how to start a digital agency from A to Z.

Last month I walked you through the launch: institutional-grade reports produced by the team advising the Milei administration on macro policy, now translated and adapted for the Founding Member tier. If you missed the first issue, it is sitting in your inbox or the archive.

This April report is, in one word, spicy.

GDP hit an all-time high, the energy sector is printing dollars, country risk keeps dropping, and the Second Circuit in New York handed Argentina an incredible win on the YPF case. At the same time, Milei took a real political hit with the Adorni scandal, and inflation has gotten slightly sticky before what is expected to be a sharp decline in 2027.

Here is what is covered inside:

• The Good: GDP, energy, YPF, and country risk all hitting milestones worth paying attention to

• The Bishop Situation: the political hit Milei just took, and who is really being targeted

• Inflation Mechanics: why the monthly rate got sticky, and the 2027 call the macro team is putting on the table

• The YPF Ruling: an 11-figure tail risk just got cut, with direct implications for the 2027 runway

• The Silver Lining: which sectors have to die for the economy to get healthier, with hard productivity data

• My read: what it means for real estate, CBI timing, and ARS-exposed businesses

Founding Members: scroll down for the full April report. If you are still on the fence, this is the kind of primary-source intelligence that institutional clients pay 20 to 30 times the subscription price to access, and you get a front-row seat here.

To the data.

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