Along the Beagle Channel, an icy stretch of water at the southern tip of the Americas, a concrete slab rises from hills covered in low, brownish scrub.
This is the dormant site of the proposed Ushuaia naval base that right-wing Argentine President Javier Milei wants to revive to serve as a military and logistical hub in the South Atlantic.
In early September, he ordered that priority be given in the government’s 2027 budget to “the development of the Integrated Naval Base and other strategic projects. The foundation stone for the Ushuaia base was laid in 2022 by the previous center-left government in Buenos Aires, but work has since stalled. Only about nine percent of the project has been completed, according to a government report submitted to lawmakers in mid-2025. “100 percent Argentine.
There is no material collaboration from the United States to build the base,” presidential spokesman Adrian Ravier said Tuesday. “For decades, the country has envisioned a naval base in Ushuaia that integrates all three branches of the armed forces, linked to Antarctic development,” said Daniel Guzman, a Falklands War veteran and now an international relations analyst. Ravier, Milei’s spokesman, said the base would have no “warlike character but will function as the most important logistics hub in the South Atlantic, providing operational and scientific support for our geopolitical projection toward Antarctica.”
Milei, a close ally of US President Donald Trump, has previously championed development of the base in the context of Argentina’s alignment with Washington.
