Globalising Argentina: Globalisation in developing countries: The case of Argentina

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