Minister Federico Sturzenegger’s chainsaw found an unexpected limit: national sovereignty. His obsession with deregulating and cutting state structures collided head-on with the geopolitical reality of the Naval Hydrography Service (SHN), a key agency for Argentina’s presence in Antarctica, the defense of the Malvinas, and control of the Paraná-Paraguay Waterway.
In the corridors of the Argentine Navy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fury is barely concealed. Senior military officials accuse the official of «total ignorance» of the SHN’s strategic importance. Sturzenegger’s famous and erroneous justification that the Navy «doesn’t even have five ships» to implement voluntary retirements and freeze budgets demonstrates, according to experts, a dangerous technical unawareness.
The SHN is not mere «bureaucratic spending,» but the scientific arm that generates the bathymetric and cartographic data essential to sustain the country’s bases in the South Atlantic. Its financial and skilled personnel dismantling directly hits the heart of the Summer Antarctic Campaign (CAV). SHN specialized personnel are responsible for sailing aboard the icebreaker ARA Almirante Irízar to carry out scientific missions and maintain lighthouses, buoys, and nautical signals on the white continent. Without resources, Argentina’s presence in Antarctica risks being degraded to mere survival logistics, losing the scientific weight required by the Antarctic Treaty to validate territorial rights.
But the danger does not end there. Ceasing to measure the seabed has immediate geopolitical consequences. SHN oceanographic data supports the demarcation of the Argentine Continental Shelf before the UN, including disputed areas surrounding the Malvinas, South Georgia, and South Sandwich Islands. The budget strangulation amounts to an indirect abandonment of these zones, ceding scientific and factual sovereignty to the logistical advance of foreign powers and British occupation.
The impact of the deregulation plan also shakes the Paraná-Paraguay Waterway. By marginalizing the SHN’s control powers and promoting the flexibilization of cabotage and mandatory pilotage to «lower logistics costs,» the government weakens the state’s policing power over the rivers. Unions and naval experts warn that allowing free navigation by foreign captains without local guides or updated official cartography will multiply the risk of groundings, accidents, and environmental catastrophes in an extremely complex lowland river.
«They still haven’t understood: these are the orders they have. No one will run aground because the same service and the SHN will do it now, the new owners of Argentina. They came to destroy the state from within, they said it to the faces of Argentines, and they are carrying it out. Don’t be surprised, it’s what they promised their real masters,» military sources fired off.
While Sturzenegger insists on his crusade against the state, the question hanging in the air is whether the cost of his chainsaw will be the loss of sovereignty on three key fronts: Antarctica, the Malvinas, and the Waterway. The answer, for now, lies in the maps that the SHN will no longer be able to update.
para mi este mini friedman sturzenegger es un vendepatria quiere desguasar la hidrografia naval y perder soberania en malvinas antartida e hidrovia los zurdos liberales nos traicionan ni un paso atras k @DonGato
para mi este gato de sturzenegger nos quiere vender la antartida y malvinas como soja se cree que la soberania se negocia con brokers nene hidrografia naval no es un gasto es la columna vertebral de nuestra presencia en el atlantico sur basura capitalista deja de desarmar la patria viva la soberania carajo