Pope Leo XIV closes Uruguay leg, heads into tense Milei meeting in Argentina

Leo marked the feast of the Virgin of the Thirty-three in Florida, north of Montevideo, where pilgrims gather each year to pray before a small wooden icon of Mary. Tradition holds that 33 independence patriots carried the Guaraní statue when independence from the Brazilian empire was declared in the city on Aug. 25, 1825. It was his last event in Uruguay before opening the Argentina leg of a trip that also takes him to Peru.

The visit made Leo the first pope in nearly four decades to set foot in Uruguay, a country that has drifted deeply secular and at times anticlerical in the decades since. He went ahead with the tour despite surgery on Oct. 13 to remove a cancerous tumor from his lung. At 71, the pope has shown no signs of slowing — singing loudly, bounding up stairs and working crowds in his popemobile past midnight Rome time, with no events cut short.

Argentina is the delicate part. Milei is due to greet Leo at the Buenos Aires airport before the two appear together for the traditional welcome ceremony and exchange of speeches, a pairing that could crackle given the church's sharp criticism of his spending cuts. Since taking office in December 2023, Milei has cut Argentina's health care budget by 48% in real terms, and planned reductions to the public university system pushed students into the streets. Official data put poverty at 32.3% of the population in the first half of 2026, roughly 15 million people.

The two men also split on technology. Milei has courted AI investment and data centers with promises of light regulation, while Leo has warned about the risks the AI race poses to humanity and the environment and pushed for strict, internationally enforced safeguards. Argentine church leaders have accused the government of putting economic orthodoxy ahead of the poor; Milei's team frames the cuts as necessary surgery on a broken economy and a purge of fraud and waste.

According to Luis Bahamondes, a professor at the University of Chile, the trip reinforces Leo's standing as more than a spiritual figure — a political leader, in his words, who does not shy from conflict and commands a respected voice. Leo is also finishing business his predecessor left undone: Pope Francis, the Argentine Jesuit and former Buenos Aires archbishop, never returned home during his 12-year pontificate. David Lantigua, a theology professor at Notre Dame's Kellogg Institute, told ABC News that Francis remains a divisive figure in Argentina and that the tension with Leo is the ministry Francis left behind.

Leo spent two decades as a missionary priest in Peru ministering to the poor, and he owes his papacy to Francis. Peru is the final stop on the tour and effectively his second homeland.