The week Argentine president Javier Milei reached the one-hundred-days-in-office mark was nothing short of catastrophic. Argentina was hit by two megastorms, one on March 11 and a second on March 20, both unleashing violent winds, egg-sized hail, and inches of rain, damaging factories, houses, and road signs. The storms left thirteen dead and wrought economic losses to the tune of hundreds of millions of US dollars.

Meanwhile, an ongoing epidemic of dengue fever had claimed seventy-nine lives and left 120,000 infected. And a wave of narco-violence swept through Rosario, the third-largest city in the country, after the drug cartels declared war on the mayor with a deadly shooting rampage that targeted bus drivers, pedestrians, and a parking garage attendant.

“We are missing the locust and the frogs, and we’ll soon reach the ten plagues,” Martin, a friend in Buenos Aires, joked after a couple beers. We were both standing in the kitchen late one night toward the end of March and, for a moment, his eyes turned somber. “I am going to be ok, and they are going to be ok,” he reassured me, looking at his fifteen-year-old son, who had stayed up late with us. “We have a home, and I have an income. I don’t know whether I will still be employed at the end of this month, though. But that is a different story.”