Abstract:
In 1983, after seven years of the cruelest dictatorship that Argentineans had ever
suffered, Mr. Raul Ricardo Alfonsin was elected president. With the hope of the
new democracy, he and his advisers thought that negotiating the debt assumed
by the military government would be an easy deal. “Our return to democracy will
help us to obtain better conditions in the rescheduling”, said Raul Prebisch in
1983 (Brandford and Kucinski, 1988: 117, my translation). Prebisch was the
initiator of the United Nations Economic Commission For Latin America (ECLA,
CEPAL in Spanish) and also an adviser to Alfonsin. But he was completely
mistaken. In 1988, Alfonsin’s government was the target of a market kick
managed by the financial sectors, which were against the government decision of
stopping the payment of debt services. The dollar soared and inflation did as
well. Six months before Alfonsin finished his term, with the inflation rate at 200
per cent, the peronist Carlos Saul Menem assumed the presidency with the
popular promise of a production revolution. However, only a couple of months
after that, an important manager of Bunge & Born, an important enterprise in
Argentina which had been characterized as a symbol of the oligarchy by the
peronists, was appointed as an Economy Minister, and Alvaro Alsogaray,
president of the Conservative Party, and the embodiment of antiperonist
liberalism, was called to advice Mr. Menem on the negotiation of the debt.
(Jozami, 2000)
As Jozami has suggested, the promise of
