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Getty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\nA minister in the government of Argentina’s Buenos Aires province, the country’s largest, has sparked controversy by suggesting that it could seek to become independent.<\/p>\n
Jorge D\u2019Onofrio, who is transport minister in the province’s left-wing Peronist administration, said in a radio interview that if it were a nation in its own right, it would have the “biggest GDP in Latin America”.<\/p>\n
He described the policies of Argentina’s national government, led by right-wing libertarian President Javier Milei, as “madness” and accused him of destroying the nation.<\/p>\n
D’Onofrio’s comments mark the latest round of a power struggle between Argentina’s central government and its biggest region.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Buenos Aires province is at odds with the Milei administration on a number of issues, including transport policy. <\/p>\n
The province, which does not include the city of Buenos Aires itself, is home to about 17.5 million people, which is nearly 40% of Argentina’s population.<\/p>\n
Its main city is La Plata, which has a metropolitan area with nearly one million inhabitants.<\/p>\n
It is one of five provinces still governed by the opposition Peronists, who lost the national presidency to Milei in elections nearly a year ago.<\/p>\n
The province’s governor is Axel Kicillof, an economist who has close ties to the Peronist faction led by ex-President Cristina Fern\u00e1ndez de Kirchner.<\/p>\n
Peronism, the political movement founded by the late President Juan Per\u00f3n in the 1940s, dominated Argentine politics for many years, but Milei’s victory in October 2023 has left it in disarray.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In an interview on Radio Splendid, D’Onofrio said: “I could be proposing today as a leader of Buenos Aires that we go to a constitutional reform to see if we get out of the national state.”<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cIf the province of Buenos Aires were a state today, it would have the richest GDP in Latin America.”<\/p>\n
He added that he did not think independence was the way forward, but that it was “a debate that we Buenos Aires citizens have to have, because we produce 45% of Argentina’s wealth and we collect 22% of revenue sharing, subsidising the inefficiency of the rest of the national state and the provinces.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The national government has just put forward plans to deregulate bus services, but Kicillof has warned that his province will not comply.<\/p>\n
If D’Onofrio has his way, the tussle could escalate even further. The transport minister said Buenos Aires even had the power to issue its own currency if it wanted to.<\/p>\n
But the idea was soon shot down by Luciano Laspina, a member of the Argentine Chamber of Deputies who belongs to the party of centre-right ex-President Mauricio Macri.<\/p>\n
“The proposal to make the Province of Buenos Aires independent from the Argentine Republic – made by one of Kicillof’s ministers – is the most ridiculous thing that has been said in years,” Laspina said in a post on X.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n