The man walking up to that post was Severino Di Giovanni, an Italian typographer from Chieti, aged 29. He had refused a priest three times. He had asked for a coffee with lots of sugar, taken one sip, and then pushed it away. When the officer tried to put the blindfold on, he shook it off: ¡Venda no! And when the rifles came up he got two words out before the volley: Evviva l'anarchia!

Eight bullets, then one more to the right temple, just to be sure.

Author Roberto Arlt (famous for his Los Siete Locos novel) was there as a reporter for El Mundo, and his chronicle is the reason we still talk about that morning. His editor cut the opening line, reportedly the only time Arlt was ever censored: "Today I have seen men put on white gloves to kill another man."1 What ran instead was a stopwatch: “Five minutes to. Anxious faces behind the bars. Four minutes fifty-eight seconds. The bolt screeches and the iron door opens.”

Severino Di Giovanni was the last man the Argentine state tried, convicted, and executed by firing squad through a procedure that at least purported to be a judicial process (his friend Paulino Scarfó met the same fate the following morning, whereas the 1956 firing squads under Aramburu’s command were something entirely different; we shall discuss both cases later). His body was placed in an unmarked grave at Chacarita Cemetery, with orders that its location be revealed to no one. The next day, the grave was found covered in red carnations. When it comes to graves in Argentina, there is always someone who knows where they are.

This story and that of anarchism in Argentina in general are essential to understand many of the problems that have plagued the country throughout much of the 20th century: the bombings and kidnappings carried out “in the name of the working class,” which would later bear the Peronist or Marxist stamp, have a documented origin. It all started in Buenos Aires around 1900, and the majority of the names associated with it were Italian. A virtually identical story unfolded in the United States during the same period, involving the same immigrants, the same ideas, and the same state response. The two stories even collided in 1927, resulting in numerous deaths in downtown Buenos Aires.

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At the end of August, Caputo announced that the State pension fund will begin lending pesos long-term to banks so they can lend pesos to first-time home buyers. Yes, a libertarian government fixing the mortgage market with ANSES funds.

Below we’ll analyze what this means, and why the timing for this plan might turn out to be optimal. We’re also running some construction numbers for 2026 compared to last year, and see what the impact of dollar-denominated company loans could mean for the construction sector.

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During the better part of the 21st century, Argentina was begging for gas. Household energy was heavily subsidized, and tankers from Qatar, Trinidad and Nigeria happily lined up in front of the regasification ship in Escobar to make sure that subsidized LNG reached porteño households. All the while the second-largest shale gas deposit outside of North America sat right under Neuquén, basically untouched.

Last week, a consortium of oil companies signed a $900 million dollar loan with nine international banks to build the pipeline that will secure Argentina’s LNG exports for good. The good news is that this was only the small part of the deal, because behind the scenes YPF, Eni and Abu Dhabi’s XRG are closing a deal with international banks for an additional $16 billion.

Today I will walk through the two financing rounds that will decide whether Vaca Muerta molecules end up in European grids and Brazilian power plants, and what Pampa Energía’s $2.7 billion investment in a fertilizer plant in Bahía Blanca could mean for Doha’s current monopoly on that front.

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From this issue on, my involvement in the macro part of the report will be more direct, and I’m adding an additional section with a highlighted local company ticker. The first company under the lens is an oil name that got a famous new shareholder this week.

Last month we were wondering if sub 2% monthly inflation would finally become a reality, and it looks like we have our answers after the INDEC came out with the latest inflation data.

Here is what is covered inside:

• Inflation: July inflation higher after June’s sub-2% print and what drove it. The reasons behind the annual number ticking up for the first time in months.

• The Nervous Spread around a Calm Peso: the official rate below 1,490 but Country Risk index rising after hitting its Milei-era low, and what the bond market is pricing.

• BCRA USD reserves < $50 Billion: reserves have hit a seven year high, despite slower buying pace.

• BCRA Reform: vote for the reform text is set for August 26, and how much of the original Milei package survived.

• “Indebted families” panic: overall delinquency map that was widely shared on social media this week, the comparison with the BIS table that puts things into perspective, and the demographics around these defaulters.

• M3 Debate: we run the numbers on the criticisms around the “money supply tripling” under Milei.

• NEW: The Ticker: A Vaca Muerta pure play I flagged back in January.

• Mara’s read: how these stats could influence Milei’s 2027 reelection campaign.

Vamos.

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Yesterday the Senate voted on a private property bill, but unfortunately the one door everyone was hoping would open up foreign direct investment (the rural land cap), remained firmly shut.

In tandem, the Argentine Central bank was asked to release the bank reserves that fund mortgages, and said no. Besides this, multiple judges are ruling in favor of mortgage delinquents, and leaving private banks to pay for the difference.

Todo bien, total normalidad.

Below I will explain why these three things will have a lasting impact on the Argentine real estate market, and why the count for transactions and mortgages is now running in opposite directions.

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Patagonian Texas goes into depth on the Vaca Muerta Sur (VMOS) pipeline, but the main headline is that this will roughly double Argentina’s oil export capacity on its own, with an initial 180,000 barrels per day, expandable to 550,000 and later 700,000.

This 437 km pipeline from the Neuquén basin to Punta Colorada on the Río Negro coast was funded by a consortium of all the big players in the Argentine energy game (YPF, PAE, Vista, Pampa, Pluspetrol, Chevron and Shell).

At the water’s edge, two monobuoys will load VLCC supertankers 6 to 8 km offshore, fed by onshore tanks holding 4 million barrels, and the first exports are expected in Q4 of this year.

By the end of the 2020s, this one pipe should be moving $15-20 billion dollars per year in exports. For a Central Bank that has been stacking US Tokens like there’s no tomorrow (as we saw in Keeping the Faith), those are exactly the dollars that could completely replace the already lowered agro export tariffs, and the whole Milei TMAP story depends on them.

It was only a matter of time before some of the usual suspects came out of their natural habitat to see if they could put a stop to the energy section of Argentina’s growth story.

The formal reason is Península Valdés, the whale sanctuary and World Heritage Site that sits around 30 km across the water in another gulf, in another province (Chubut).

But the real story involves a familiar set of protagonists: international NGOs, foreign money, and the playbook I already described three years ago in The Role of NGOs in South America. Below we go through UNESCO’s latest joyita, who actually signed the petition, and why the same organizations go completely quiet the moment a drilling rig flies a British flag.

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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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