In contemporary Argentina, which conjures the shadows of the Echeverría slaughterhouse, death has revolutionized its phenomena. It no longer erupts with the kinetic violence of the nineteenth century nor with the sinister rituals of uniforms and work groups that characterized the cruelty of the 1970s. Today, the state’s lethality operates under an administrative logic: it arrives silently, hidden in reduced budget allocations, in a disjointed program, and in the signing of decisions that decide, under the term “financial balance,” the life or death of the weakest.
If in the past the state has used direct physical violence, the current administration is trying to use a more sophisticated method: behavior by collective and systematic omission. We are not dealing with isolated negligence, but with malicious behavior that challenges underlying criminal offences. The state’s deliberate withdrawal is not just a technical rearrangement, but an aggression whose effect – in terms of the loss of life – is no less effective than any outright violence.
The first to be affected are always themselves: retirees who see their livelihoods evaporating, people with disabilities who lose essential support, and cancer patients who face interruptions in treatment where time is literally life. The health system provides the most convincing evidence: the national vaccination program was frozen when diseases that health memory had considered overcome resurfaced, and the Garrahan Hospital, an icon of national pediatrics, suffers from a lack of funding that its specialists denounce as a direct attack on children’s health.
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The official “no money” defense collapses in the face of tax evidence and exposes the criminal nature of the amendment. The government of Javier Miley did not cease its authority to collect taxes. The most blatant and legally criminalized example is the liquid fuel tax (ICL). By law, this tax has a specific mission: maintaining road infrastructure. The state obtains the resource every time a citizen loads fuel, but the executive authority arbitrarily decides not to use that money for the purpose specified by law, and to transfer it to liquidate obligations or achieve a financial surplus.
This maneuver falls, at first glance, into the category of embezzlement of public funds (Article 260 of the Penal Code). But the risk goes beyond the inherited line: when the decision not to repair the road – after allocating funds for it – causes death, the direct causal relationship is complete. “Sudden maneuver to avoid the well” is a phrase repeated in police reports. Every death due to an avoidable pothole or lack of signage is not considered a traffic accident; It is a death attributed to public policy.
Here we enter into the field of criminal liability for improper omission. Public officials, from the president to his ministers, occupy the position of guarantor regarding the basic legal rights of citizens. By withholding resources for vaccines, cancer treatments or road safety, these resources do not lead to “savings”; They increase the permissible risks to criminal levels. The subjective element is ultimately the fraud: the official represents death as a possible consequence of his inaction, but acts carelessly, prioritizing the financial goal.
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By connecting the facts – roads that are crumbling, vaccines that do not arrive, hospitals that are empty – this pattern ceases to be a collection of ordinary crimes and becomes a systematic attack. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, in its Article 7, defines crimes against humanity. Specifically, Section 1.B classifies “extermination,” and explains in Section 2.B that this includes “the intentional imposition of living conditions by, among other things, the denial of access to food or medicine, with the aim of causing the destruction of part of a population.”
Deliberate planning to withdraw life support from a state to vulnerable groups, undertaken with knowledge of its lethality and having the tax resources to avoid it, meets the objective and subjective requirements of this type of international criminal offence. Concentration camp is not required; It is sufficient to create administrative conditions such that death is an inevitable statistical consequence of public policy.
In the face of this reality, the inevitable question becomes: Does President Milley realize the cost to human lives that his program is taking? Argentina’s history bears witness to experience in governing the organs of organized power. The near future may require a new judicial investigation of historical significance. A kind of CONADEP of the vital consequences of adaptation, mandated to investigate not only the forced disappearance of people, but also crimes against life committed from the cold of the office. An example that determines whether these deaths are the necessary cost of the crisis, or the result of a criminal plan carried out by indirect perpetrators who have decided that the price of adaptation policies will be paid with the lives of the most isolated people.