Buenos Aires, Argentina – Marianela Abasto, 24, had never been to a soup kitchen before. Now, she sits on an old school chair in a busy courtyard outside of one, eating a ravioli stew from a disposable plastic container.

She and her four-year-old daughter, Alma, wait for her husband, Saul, 36, to finish having a shower inside the facility, which also offers hygiene services. It’s an unusually warm November afternoon in Buenos Aires, and Abasto looks exhausted.

Over the past year, Abasto lost her home. She blames the Argentinian government for her present circumstances.

“This is very hard. Before, we had a home. We had access to subsidies. But [the government] suddenly took everything away,” Abasto told Al Jazeera, her face a mix of sadness and resignation. “I don’t know what we are going to do.”

Abasto is one of the increasing numbers of Argentinians who fell deeper into poverty during the first year of Javier Milei’s presidency.

For nearly 40 years, Argentina’s poverty level had consistently hovered above 25 percent. But since the far-right Milei took office on December 10, 2023, that figure has skyrocketed.

Over the last year, the poverty rate reached nearly 53 percent. That is the highest level in 20 years, according to a research team at the Argentine Catholic University (UCA) that has kept track of key economic indicators.

That spike has led experts and advocates to increasingly question Milei’s “chainsaw” approach to slashing public spending — and its consequences.

Marianela Abasto and her daughter, Alma, eat ravioli outside a soup kitchen in Buenos Aires [Patricio A Cabezas/Al Jazeera]
Eduardo Donza, one of the experts behind the UCA study, warned that those who fell under the poverty line this year included people with jobs and higher education.

“This is the result of a number of structural issues, including the drastic devaluation of the peso, which was part of Milei’s ‘shock’ economic plan,” Donza told Al Jazeera. “Argentina is a very particular country where these types of devaluations directly impact prices.”

Donza is critical of Milei’s sweeping changes to the economy, which he warned could backfire.

“The outlook is challenging,” Donza told Al Jazeera. “The government believes that, by fixing the macroeconomic variables, they can fix the overall economy, but that doesn’t necessarily work in practice.”