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00:00As President Javier Mele was winning the battle inside the National Congress, outside, anger
00:05among protesters was rising. There were clashes with police, but to little effect on the five
00:11hours of stormy debate inside the chamber. The opposition failed to gather the votes
00:17required to bypass the presidential veto.
00:20Mele had used his prerogative to defeat a bill that would have raised pensions by 8.1
00:26per cent. Pensions in Argentina lag far behind rampant inflation, which has been as high
00:31as 95 per cent since the start of the year. Unable to make ends meet, Argentinians are
00:38increasingly desperate.
00:40I'm retired and I don't have enough. I buy two kilos of meat, two kilos of bread and
00:46it's all gone.
00:49I don't make it to the end of the month. I can't. Like everybody, I have had to stop
00:54buying food. I've had to change a lot of what I buy.
00:58Since his inauguration last December, Javier Mele has been imposing punishing austerity
01:03on the country, he says, to balance Argentina's budget. But though inflation has eased in
01:09recent months, poverty continues to rise. A report by the Catholic University of Argentina
01:15says 55 per cent of Argentinians now live below the poverty line, with 17.5 per cent
01:20destitute, the highest rate since the country's Great Depression of 2002.