Argentina Universities Paralyzed by Nationwide Strikes and Student Occupations Following Congressional Veto on Funding Law

BUENOS AIRES — Public higher education institutions across Argentina were brought to an unprecedented nationwide standstill on Monday as student unions, academic faculties, and administrative worker federations coordinated massive campus occupations and launched a 48-hour general strike to protest President Javier Milei's successful congressional veto of the University Financing Law.

The sweeping wave of civil resistance erupted after the national Chamber of Deputies fell just six votes shy of reaching the two-thirds supermajority required to override the presidential veto. The legislation, passed with broad cross-party support, would have mandated automatic inflationary adjustments to public university operating budgets and raised salaries for professors whose real earnings have plunged by more than thirty percent amid triple-digit annual inflation.

At the prestigious University of Buenos Aires (UBA)—ranked among the premier academic centers in Latin America—students took control of over twenty flagship faculties, including Medicine, Law, Philosophy, and Exact Sciences. Rather than abandoning coursework, students and professors dragged chairs and blackboards into major thoroughfares like Avenida Córdoba and Plaza de Mayo, holding defiant "open-air classes" to engage the general public in debate over the preservation of free, secular public education.

Similar building takeovers and protest assemblies erupted across the provinces, paralyzing campuses at the National University of Córdoba, the National University of La Plata, and institutions across Rosario, Mendoza, and Tucumán. National rector councils warned that without emergency budget replenishments, public universities face imminent utility shutoffs and the cancellation of vital scientific research programs.

President Milei defended his administration's intransigent stance during an economic symposium in Buenos Aires, reiterating that unfinanced legislative expenditures threaten his flagship zero-fiscal-deficit anchor and accusing political adversaries of using public universities to orchestrate fiscal sabotage against macroeconomic stabilization.

Academic trade union confederations announced that if the national executive fails to reopen formal salary renegotiation tables by the end of the week, they will organize a third massive National Federal March to Plaza de Mayo, uniting hundreds of thousands of citizens in defense of Argentine scientific and educational sovereignty.