This may partly explain Peter Thiel’s recent decision to temporarily relocate to Argentina.
As most readers will already know, the co-founder of Palantir, Peter Thiel (anagram: The Reptile), has temporarily relocated to Argentina, after meeting with President Javier Milei and his minister of deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger, in April. A host of reasons have been floated as to why Thiel has made this unexpected move, including Thiel’s obvious appreciation for Javier Milei’s particular brand of faux libertarianism, which closely mirrors his own.
Milei’s reactionary anti-statism, summed up with his phrase, “I love being a mole inside the State. I’m the one destroying it from within”, coupled with his contempt for even the most basic liberal principles, no doubt sits comfortably with Thiel’s own feelings about politics and the modern state. Like much about Thiel, those feelings are riddled with contradictions, given that government agencies have always been Palantir’s largest and most significant customer base.
Indeed, Palantir itself came into existence as the result of a sneaky spinoff of DARPA’s hugely controversial Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. Its first ever investor was In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. And if Thiel’s dark vision for our future becomes a reality, the State will still exist but it will be controlled, lock, stock and barrel, by private corporations like his. And it will be even more powerful and controlling.
Another possible factor in Thiel’s move is the Milei government’s near-total subservience to the US and Israel, whose militaries, government agencies and companies are among Palantir’s most important clients. Milei’s enthusiasm for some of Silicon Valley’s more dangerous ideas, as well as the no doubt tempting possibility of being able to implement those ideas with much greater ease in Argentina than the US, may have also played a part in Thiel’s decision.
The explanation that strikes me as least likely is that Thiel is fleeing the US out of fear of the country’s current direction — a bizarre notion given that Thiel is one of Trump’s most influential backers, has helped to shape US policy during both of his administrations, and is the patron of Vice-President (and possibly future president) JD Vance.
Thiel could, of course, just be looking for a place far enough away from the worst of the nuclear fallout in the event of WW3. But then he already holds New Zealand citizenship after spending just 12 days there in 2011. Perhaps he’s just shopping around. Or, as Drey argues below, “this is not a man running from the state; this is a man shopping for the next state to optimise…”
Argentina, even as it was before Milei’s presidency, offers an even juicier prize for the likes of Thiel that is broadly overlooked: land. As investigative journalist Whitney Webb posited in a recent tweet, Argentina’s biggest draw for Thiel may be that it “allows wealthy, foreign billionaires to establish de facto parallel states in the country, where the federal government declines to intervene, even to protect its own citizens and laws”:
Roughly seven years ago, I traveled to Argentina and wrote about how UK billionaire Joe Lewis (who Trump recently pardoned after he was found guilty of insider trading) had established one such “parallel state” in Argentine Patagonia, and even controls a private airport that the Argentine state doesn’t even pretend to monitor. (Article link is below)
Lewis is a Jewish-British financier whose family trust owns Tottenham Hotspur football club and who was pardoned by Trump last year on 16 charges of insider trading.
It was in 1996 that he bought 13,000 hectares of land surrounding Lago Escondido, in Río Negro. As Spain’s El Diario reports, the vast plot of land, just six kms from Argentina’s border with Chile, was purchased through a national company with Argentine shareholders, since Argentine Law prevents foreign ownership of land less than 50 kms from the border.
Lewis fenced off the land, built a mansion and a private airport and, for almost 20 years, fought in court to prevent public access to the lake. The Superior Court of Justice of Río Negro, three years ago, ruled in his favour: the Tacuifi road had to be closed and those who wanted to access the lake would have to do so via mountain paths.
The case of Lago Escondido is one of the most egregious examples of “foreignization” of land in Patagonia, but it is not the only one. According to a report by the Land Observatory, around five percent of Argentine territory is in foreign hands — that’s more than 13 million hectares, roughly equivalent to the entire area of Lewis’s native England.
As Webb points out, this begs the question:
Did Milei allow Thiel the opportunity to experiment with one such “parallel state”? Given how Thiel and his associates are eager to create “network states” along similar lines, and Milei’s own ideological leanings and personal ties to that crowd, it is an angle worth considering…
In the 2000s, as foreign purchases of Argentine land surged, the Cristina Fernández de Kirchner-controlled Congress responded by passing Law 26,737 in 2011, which placed a 15% limit on the purchase of land by foreign companies or individuals in any given province. The law also established that no foreign nationality can exceed 30% of that 15% allowed, and that the same foreign owner cannot own more than 1,000 hectares in the core area in question.
The Milei government now wants to eliminate all those restrictions, and it hopes to be able to count on the support of the governors of Argentina’s 23 provinces to get its bill across the line. That’s right: Milei and his handlers literally want to allow the unlimited sale of Argentine land to foreign investors. From El Diario (machine translated):
“The Land Law is to regional economies what the Glacier Law was to mining,” said Sturzenegger, during a conference organized by the Argentine Rural Confederations, where he promised that, if the limits on foreign ownership were eliminated, more than $15 billion of capital would enter. The Minister of Deregulation’s argument was that if all restrictions on foreign ownership were eliminated, investments in all productive areas of the country would be unblocked.
This is not the first time that the government has tried to move against the Rural Land Law. As soon as he became president, …Milei issued… a [“Mega-Decree”]… that included the elimination of Law 26,737. The Justice Depertment however, accepted an injunction presented by the Malvinas Islands La Plata Center for ex-combatants that warned that eliminating the law “…poses a direct threat to the principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty.”
The problem was not only the removal of the 15% cap for foreign individuals or companies, but that it swept away all other existing restrictions, even for foreign nation states*. The Rural Land Law also prohibits the acquisition of land located in strategic areas, such as those that contain permanent bodies of water or are located in border security zones… Milei sought to eliminate everything.
It is not hard to see why such a free-for-all would appeal to a man like Peter Thiel, who is already a huge proponent for charter cities. He was a key financial backer of Próspera, a controversial libertarian charter city established on the Honduran island of Roatán. The project allowed foreign investors to operate independent of Honduran laws and taxes, functioning as a “crypto-libertarian paradise”. It didn’t long for local residents to begin kicking up a fuss.
Honduras’ previous Xiomara Castro government tried to pull the rug from under Próspera’s feet by doing away with part of the law that allowed charter cities to operate as more or less autonomous territories on Honduran soil. Próspera’s response was to sue the government for $10.8 billion — enough to bankrupt the country. Now that the right-wing National Party is back in power, charter cities like Próspera will once again have free reign…
Click here to read the full article on Naked Capitalism
Nick Corbishley 