Buenos Aires, Argentina — Struggling to support her family after losing her job as a cleaner earlier this year, Norma Villarreal, 56, went to church in a barren Buenos Aires suburb on Wednesday and waited for more than an hour in the predawn darkness to make a request to Saint Cayetano, the patron saint of bread and work.

“We are very hungry and tired, and since the government never does anything for us, I asked the saint,” Villarreal said of the Roman Catholic priest who was canonized in 1671 for using his family’s fortune to support the poor of Naples.

Throughout Argentina’s decades of political change, the annual August 7 pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Cayetano has been a haunting and somber reminder that economic despair is pervasive in Argentina. But this year is perhaps unique in one respect: The despair over rising unemployment that is driving Argentines to invoke St. Cayetano is coupled with anger over libertarian President Javier Milei’s painful austerity program.

The government’s shocking economic measures – aimed at cutting public spending by around three percent of the country’s gross domestic product each year – have triggered a severe recession and pushed unemployment to almost eight percent.

The number of ageing pilgrims crossing themselves and holding rosaries in front of the shrine has declined in recent years – a sign that observers say reflects the declining importance of Roman Catholicism in Argentina rather than an improvement in the unemployment rate, which has risen by a full two percentage points in the past five months.

Following Wednesday’s pilgrimage, the country’s unions and left-wing opposition parties gathered thousands for a protest rally outside the presidential palace in downtown Buenos Aires, where they chanted slogans against Milei and lamented his mass dismissals of civil servants.

“We don’t eat breakfast, we just drink a little tea in the morning, but he doesn’t see that… he says we are the cause of the problem,” says 60-year-old Ana Maria Muñoz, who lost her job in the local government five months ago in a wave of layoffs following Milei’s budget cuts. She hasn’t been able to find work since.

“They got rid of me. I’m not sure if it was because of my age or whatever, but so many of us got fired,” she said, carrying her state union’s banner across the city’s main square.

While Milei has prioritized tackling the country’s staggering inflation rate – which fell to 4.2% month-on-month in June, the lowest since January 2022 – annual inflation is still above 270%, one of the highest rates in the world, and outpacing wages. Unemployment has become a growing problem as Milei’s government freezes public works projects and closes ministries in its campaign to shrink the state.

“The decisions being made lack humanity and do not even take quality into account,” says Orlando Ortega, a 58-year-old civil servant whose former employer, the National Children’s Secretariat, was recently dissolved and incorporated into the Ministry of Human Capital along with other government agencies.

He said the government had cut the budget so much that those who escaped the recent wave of layoffs could barely do their jobs.

“For seven months we have had no resources, we cannot travel, we can provide some basic logistical support, but we are not even implementing our policies,” he said, shouting to be heard over the roar of sound grenades and the thunderous shouts of his union colleagues in the square. “When you think about it, laying off a few hundred seems to have cost the government more than it saved.”

In his daily press conference, Milei’s spokesman dismissed Wednesday’s protests against unemployment as a political maneuver by the opposition.

“This government has come to eradicate the evils that have plagued Argentines for decades,” said spokesman Manuel Adorni, accusing the organizers of the protests of being “responsible for the economic disaster that this government has inherited.”

Union leaders resisted, portraying their march as a natural expression of anger and grief over lost jobs.

“We demand that Milei give us back the jobs he took away and the money he stole from us,” said Rodolfo Aguiar, head of the state workers’ union. “The budget surplus is built on suffering.”