CLASHES escalated between Argentinian authorities and anti-government protesters on Wednesday, angered by President Javier Milei’s spending cuts.

Protesters who blocked the capital’s key thoroughfare were forcibly dispersed and eight of the movement’s participants were arrested.

Riot police officers deployed powerful water cannon, drenching demonstrators. 

Argentinians demanding more food for soup kitchens hurled sticks and stones, set rubbish bins alight and paralysed the main street of Buenos Aires in defiance of new legal changes banning roadblocks.

Strikes and protests have gripped the country in recent weeks as Argentinians, struggling to cope with President Milei’s brutal austerity measures amid soaring inflation, vent their anger and despair on the streets. Bus drivers were set to take strike action today.

President Milei’s far-right government passed new measures last December empowering security forces to arrest and disperse protesters who block roads. 

Mr Milei has also threatened to withdraw social assistance from those accused of disrupting traffic.

Critics, including a team of United Nations human rights experts, have slammed the restrictions as civil liberties violations.

“We are finishing liberating Julio de 9,” said Waldo Wolff, Buenos Aires’s minister of security, referring to the traffic-clogged thoroughfare on Wednesday. “We are restoring order in the centre of Buenos Aires.”

Mr Wolff told local media that eight protesters had been charged with vandalism.

President Milei has drastically slashed government spending, laying off public-sector workers, reducing energy and transport subsidies, cancelling public works and reducing transfers to provinces.

As annual inflation tops 276 per cent and Argentinians slip deeper into poverty, they have increasingly flocked to soup kitchens run by left-wing parties or social groups to tide them over. 

But Mr Milei’s austerity measures have also hurt food pantries by halting food deliveries and cutting their funding.

“The only thing this government proposes for the people is planned misery,” the workers’ union leading the protest said.