The year Argentina stops being afraid of the future

For decades, Argentinians learned to live with a demoralizing certainty: no matter what we did, the country did not grow. We almost made it part of our identity. We invented theories to explain that yoke that crushed us: external restrictions, distributive struggles, the world's conspiracy against us, and we resigned ourselves to managing decline as if it were a destiny. But it was not a destiny; it was a decision. We had chosen to prohibit our growth, and we fulfilled it with a discipline that astonishes.

The remarkable thing about this moment is that this decision was reversed with the arrival of our president Javier Milei at a speed that few imagined.

• The reform of the Glaciers Law is not a technical adjustment: it unlocks the largest copper, silver, and gold mines in the world, which we had chosen to ignore while Chile, on the other side of the same mountain range, exported what we had prohibited.

• The modification of the Land Law opens associations between local producers and external investors that can transform the landscape of NEA, NOA, Cuyo, and Patagonia, with potential investments of nearly 15 billion dollars.

• The labor modernization, the first reform of its kind since the return of democracy, allows company agreements to prevail over national ones, an unprecedented labor federalism that returns decision-making power to each region and each worker.

And that is just part of it. In just one semester, we are implementing structural reforms that reconfigure the country from the ground up: labor modernization; glacier reform; the Big Bang of the capital market, which frees financing for SMEs; the entry into force of the Mercosur-European Union agreement; the new intellectual property regime for seeds; the property law; the liberation of cabotage navigation, which dramatically lowers transportation costs, boosting the northern provinces and their ports; the modernization of the Companies Law, with an unprecedented figure for artificial intelligence companies; the privatization of Belgrano Cargas and the roads, and the free trade agreement with the USA.

Each of the mentioned reforms moves a different piece: the productive matrix, logistics, costs, financing, investment in the field. A federal and decentralizing perspective like we have never seen before in Argentina. A lot of noise above, on the surface, while below the Government advances like a bulldozer that frees Argentinians to do, produce, trade, and grow.

Each of these reforms has an economic dimension that anyone recognizes: more investment, more exports, more productivity. But they also have a deeper dimension, that of political economy. Each obstacle that falls weakens those who lived off that obstacle. Each privilege that disappears takes power away from those who used it to block change. That is why what is happening is not just an improvement in the variables; it is a change in the balance of power that kept the country immobile for half a century.

And here is what excites me the most. When one unleashes the energy of a society, that society responds. We are already seeing it in every SME that can export without asking for permission, in every mining and energy investment that arrives because finally someone respects property rights, in every entrepreneur who discovers that the State has stopped being an obstacle. That energy has always been there, repressed under layers of regulations and fears. We did not create it; we just let it out.

We have a golden opportunity ahead of us: to do in this time what was not done in decades. And for the first time in decades, the challenge is not to explain why we failed, but to prepare for what is coming. Argentina had prohibited itself from growing. Now we must get used to production records, export records, and seeing investments we never dreamed of.

In short, we have moved from prohibiting to allowing growth. And Argentinians, with freedom, are already making it a reality. ¡VLLC!