Argentina's populist presidential candidate Javier Milei faces criticism as the peso takes a dive

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Argentina’s firebrand populist presidential candidate Javier Milei is coming under fire from his rivals who are blaming him for a sharp depreciation of the local currency in the parallel market

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Argentina’s firebrand populist presidential candidate Javier Milei, the front-runner to win the election later this month, is coming under fire from his rivals who blame him for a sharp depreciation of the local currency in the parallel market.

Milei has continued to tout his controversial plan for dollarization of the South American country’s economy. With a little less than two weeks to go before the Oct. 22 presidential election, the Argentine peso has sharply depreciated over the past week.

The so-called blue rate, as the informal exchange rate is known, closed at around 1,025 pesos to the U.S. dollar Tuesday, a sharp increase from 880 pesos on Friday. The rate was at 605 pesos per dollar before the upstart Milei rocked Argentina’s political landscape by unexpectedly emerging as the top vote-getter in the country’s national primaries on Aug. 13.

Stringent capital controls mean that access to the official foreign exchange market, which currently prices a dollar at 367 pesos, is extremely limited, so parallel rates have flourished.

Milei, an anti-establishment candidate who admires former U.S. President Donald Trump, has said he wants to replace the peso with the dollar and says Argentina’s Central Bank should be abolished.

The peso had already been steadily depreciating for months, but took a sharp downturn Monday after Milei, in a radio interview, recommended that Argentines not renew fixed rate deposits, saying the “peso is the currency issued by the Argentine politician, and therefore it is not