Argentina: Over 1200 scientists pen letter to Macri condemning cuts to science, research

Over 1,200 internationally renowned scientists and academics, including eleven Nobel Prize winners, have penned a joint letter to President Mauricio Macri regarding the ongoing crisis in Argentina's research and scientific community - a situation they say has been brought on by his policies.

The letter protested funding cuts to the National Research Council (CONICET), other public research agencies, as well as to the nation's 57 public universities.

Federal spending on science and technology has fallen by nearly 60% since Macri took office, from $1.2 billion in 2015 to $500 million in the 2019 budget. The Science Ministry itself was dissolved on September 5.

The letter also accused Macri of failing to meet "commitments in subsidies for research and international cooperation" and abandoning infrastructure improvement plans at scientific and research institutions.

After “twelve years of continuous growth and expansion,” the country’s science and technology areas are collapsing, the letter read.

The signatories say that CONICET "is on the verge of paralysis" and that the jobs of 10,000 scientists, 10,000 doctoral and postdoctoral fellows and almost 3,000 technicians are in danger.

Brain drain

The local scientific community has warned since 2016 of a return of the brain drain suffered by Argentina from the 1960s until the 2000s.

An estimated 15,000 scientists, engineers, and technicians emigrated between Gen. Juan Carlos Onganía's 1966 firing of 1,400 academics for political reasons, and the 2001-02 economic crisis.

During Macri's center-left predecessors, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, over 1,300 scientists returned from 2003 to 2015.

"The only job opportunities for our scientists today are by way of the international airport," former University Policy Secretary Aldo Caballero lamented. "They have to leave because here the government defunds science and universities."

"My daughter and her husband (a physicist and a mathematician) just did."

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Argentine researchers protest Macri's cutbacks in science and technology, which has led to mass layoffs and is renewing the brain drain which saddled Argentine research during past dictatorships and economic crises.