This Friday afternoon, Javier Milei and part of his Cabinet will embark on a curious trip to Antarctica, in which they will be accompanied by the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi.
The President asked the Minister of the Interior, Guillermo Francos, to join this afternoon's trip. They will sleep in Río Gallegos and very early in the morning they will travel to the Argentine base in Marambio, from where they will return the same day according to the weather possibilities.
On the trip are: Grossi, Foreign Minister Diana Mondino, the Minister of Defense, Luis Petri, the secretary of the presidency and Milei's sister, Karina, the new secretary of the Malvinas Area, Paola Di Chiaro and the director of Conicet, Daniel Salamone.
There are several sides to the journey. Diplomats consulted said that it seeks to show the strategic interest that the government will have in Antarctica with the aim that Argentina "becomes a key player with a strategic presence in Antarctica and in cooperation with the IAEA."
By the way, it is an important wink between Milei and Grossi, who met only a few days ago and liked each other so much that they surprisingly planned the trip that for the director of the world atomic organization also has another purpose. It is known that Grossi - who is a career ambassador in the Argentine Foreign Ministry - does not hide that he wants to launch an international campaign to be secretary general of the United Nations and replace the Portuguese Antonio Guterres. It is logical that he needs the Argentine president.
President Javier Milei and the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi
This is also a positive and important turn by Milei towards an environmentalist policy, considering that his statements during the election campaign that brought him to power, put him at the first hour at the international level of climate change deniers, such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro.
On the other hand, while Milei is getting closer to the policy of Chilean Gabriel Boric - who travelled to Antarctica with UN Secretary General Guterres at the end of 2023 - which has the same universalist and non-sovereigntist scientific aims - Alberto Fernández's position changes: more nationalist, confrontational with Chile and the United Kingdom. When the former president and his officials set foot in Marambio in February 2023, the first thing they did was raise their fingers in sign of the Peronist V.
On the other hand, it is quite a gesture that Francos joins all those hours in which the President is going to be in the company of his collaborators, taking into account that the Minister of the Interior is facing an internal crisis to contain the mistakes of the new government in front of the governors, the unions, the businessmen and the radical and poorly elaborated form of several of the reforms.
Although there have been reports that the minister wanted to resign from his post, there are only traces of a fierce internal struggle between "hawks" and "doves". Francos is a fundamental piece with a political waist that Milei needs.
On the other hand, the trip to Antarctica angered the province of Tierra del Fuego and the government of Gustavo Melella, a Kirchnerist radical who was not invited to a greeting in Santa Cruz to Milei, even though the province is the one that by constitution contains the territory. For that matter, the province is called Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica and South Atlantic Islands.
The Agenda
TheBoeing 737 that will carry the presidential entourage will depart this afternoon at 17 p.m. from Aeroparque to Rio Gallegos. There she will be received by the governor of Santa Cruz, Claudio Vidal. They could have left from Ushuaia, capital of Antarctica, according to Melella's government, and they were not included in any instance until Friday at noon, according to Clarín and the parties.
This Saturday they will cross from Rio Gallegos early to Marambio, the largest of Argentina's 13 bases in Antarctica. They will cross in an Air Force C-130 Hercules, on a three-and-a-half-hour journey and spend seven hours at the base.
There, Milei and Grossi are expected to lead a launch event of the Cooperation with Argentina in the field of Nuclear Technology for the Control of Plastic Pollution. A project known as Microplastics in the Antarctic Environment: Implementation of the Nutec Plastics initiative. Milei and Grossi will speak.
They are expected to take a helicopter trip to the Esperanza Base and take samples. They will return that same day to Río Gallegos to escape any inclement weather that would cause them to be stranded there.
Curiosity of this series of trips. First it was Boric and Guterres to Antarctica on a trip similar to that of Milei and Grossi. Last Wednesday, the United Kingdom's Minister for the Americas, the Caribbean and Overseas Territories, David Rutley, was also in Antarctica after his visit to the Falkland Islands, where he strongly ratified what London calls the islanders' right to "self-determination" to decide their future in terms of sovereignty.
The government of Javier Milei will continue to claim the Falkland Islands from the United Kingdom. But a low-intensity, conflict-free claim is expected. Wait.
Argentina, Chile and the United Kingdom have overlapping territorial claims in Antarctica, which has a special status. By the Antarctic Treaty, none of the member countries actually has the right to exercise sovereignty in the terms of territorial agreements, preserving the peaceful and scientific use of it.