David Rock, "Racking Argentina" (Part 2)

hydrarchist writes: "Here's part 2 which includes the footnotes."

The programme’s implementation, however, provoked fierce controversy. The complaints began when Menem used the emergency law to institute privatization by decree, and then exploited his powers of appointment to the Supreme Court to impede investigations of malfeasance. Government administrators of the sell-offs were accused of squandering national assets, and of ignoring criteria of efficiency or service. Public Works Minister Roberto Dromi made no effort to create regulatory bodies for the newly formed private monopolies. María Julia Alsogaray, the daughter of one of Argentina’s leading liberal politicians

Political transformations

As he reformed the economy, Menem redrew the political map of Argentina. The most striking changes of the 1990s lay in the eclipse of the military—a dominant force in the country since the nineteenth century—and the steep decline of the once powerful trade unions. The army’s standing had suffered an irreparable blow during the ‘Dirty War’ of the 1970s, compounded by humiliating defeat in the Malvinas; they had been ejected from government in disgrace in 1983. Throughout the Alfonsín years, hard-line military factions had fought against cuts in the defence budget and the trials of former junta leaders. Menem adopted a subtler policy. On the one hand, he proclaimed an era of ‘national reconciliation’—200 officers, sentenced for murder or torture on the basis of irrefutable evidence, walked free in his amnesty of October 1989. On the other, he cracked down on the resistance of the extreme-right carapintados, or ‘painted faces’. The last barracks rebellion occurred in December 1990, following Menem’s restoration of relations with Britain. The army command was ordered to crush it, and complied. The ringleader Colonel Mohamed Seineldín, another turco, was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Compulsory military service was abolished. With strong IMF support, the administration set about privatizing key sections of the military-industrial complex, including the arms producer Fabricaciones Militares, and selling off some of the army’s vast real-estate holdings. By 1993, force levels had been further reduced to 65,000, with the number of generals falling from seventy in 1989 to thirty-two in 1995. Morale was maintained by energetic participation in UN/US ‘peacekeeping’ operations. Since Menem’s personal decision to send two ships, airforce transport planes and 600 commissioned and non-commissioned officers to join the blockade of Iraq in September 1990, Argentine forces have taken part in operations in Croatia, Somalia, Cyprus, Kuwait, Haiti and Angola. ‘Marching alongside US troops in a Gulf War welcome-home parade—a much reported event back home in Argentina—was a dramatic change of profile for Argentine troops’, a local paper noted at the time. [23] In terms of domestic politics, however, the military became invisible. In December 2001, De la Rúa called for armed intervention against the rioters in Buenos Aires. The commanders refused to obey until instructed to do so by Congress. That order never came.

Since the 1940s, the trade unions had been a key component of the populist coalition. Their influence—embodied in the ‘62 Organizations’ of the General Confederation of Labour (CGT)—reached a peak in 1973, when Perón began a brief third term as president. Subjected to brutal repression by the military dictatorship, organized labour was further undermined by deep recessions from 1975 onwards, sapping manufacturing industry. Nevertheless, by the 1980s the unions seemed to have regained their vitality. Thirteen short general strikes contributed to the fall of Alfonsín in mid-1989. Menem’s post-victory volte-face caused consternation among the labour bosses that had supported his election campaign, but they took no counter-action. The result was a split in the CGT in October 1989, between public-sector workers and others who would bear the brunt of the promised austerity measures, and the bulk of private-sector unions who still favoured ‘dialogue’ with the government. Attempts at reunification in 1992 finally resulted in a permanent break, with the dissident unions forming the Confederación de Trabajadores Argentinos (CTA).

Menem commonly suborned support, and union leaders who endorsed privatization received generous rewards. Dialoguistas Luis Barrionuevo of the food workers’ union and Jorge Triaca, the plastic workers’ head, were respectively put in charge of the Social Works Administration and the national steel company SOMISA; although the scale of the corruption charges brought against them eventually obliged Menem to sack them both. The changes wrought by privatization, trade liberalization and the contraction of public works had a more profound impact on the position of labour. The unprecedented levels of unemployment they created—noted in an ECLAC survey as early as 1994, on the crest of economic expansion—diminished the negotiating power of the unions. [24] The long-term trend from factory work to cuentapropismo—underemployment, marginality and inequality—accelerated through the 1990s. Argentine workers had once enjoyed standards of living comparable to those of Western Europeans. By the end of the century, the resemblance was rather to the once much poorer nations of Latin America.

Nevertheless—testament to organized labour’s continued public role—Menem failed in his attempt to push through legislation on ‘flexibilization’ that would have facilitated the hire of temporary workers, sub-par wage payments and the abandonment of traditional collective-bargaining methods in favour of decentralized or plant-by-plant negotiations. [25] Meanwhile Argentina’s long tradition of militant trade unionism was continued by the minority CTA, organizing state employees, teachers, radical metalworkers and others. Under the leadership of the public-sector workers’ Víctor De Gennaro, it has played a prominent role in the highway barricades organized by the piqueteros during 2002. The teachers’ union CTERA has been one of the most active groups within the CTA, reflecting its members’ opposition to the decentralization of the Argentine education system and the grotesque inadequacy of provincial funding. [26]

But if the mainstays of the old Peronist bloc had been dissolved or neutralized, Menem proved adroit at manipulating new forms of populism which by-passed the traditional corporate groups. [27] The Peronists re-invented machine politics during the 1990s, using local party networks to create webs of patron-client relations reminiscent of the Radical party comités of the early twentieth century (also designed to blunt the effects of liberal economics). Rather than organizing through the unions, they now approached people as individuals, householders or consumers. Women have played an important role in this latest generation of party bosses, working the unidades básicas or Justicialista party cells at the level of the manzana, the city block. Loyalty was shored up by providing goods for the poor—paid for out of public funds, but dispensed by the party. Operating in the shantytowns of Gran Buenos Aires, ‘Chiche’ Duhalde, the wife of Eduardo, became a leading practitioner of the new approach. The neopopulists resurrected Yrigoyen’s methods of trafficking in public appointments: party loyalists flocked into the bureaucracy, seeking the rewards of office. Menemist decentralization added a further dimension to the process, with provincial leaders exploiting their expanded role as providers of health and education to create new forms of patronage. [28]

While the neoliberal programme called for a reduction in government expenditure, neo-populism and the clientelismo it entailed somewhat mitigated this trend. In Buenos Aires Province—by far the largest, with a population of 9 million—spending rose fairly consistently throughout the decade, as shown in Table 1 below (a significant proportion of this was locally raised). The same pattern prevailed in the next most populous provinces, Córdoba and Santa Fe. Governors here pushed for a greater share of coparticipación funds. As unemployment worsened, they would also come under intense pressure from below. The federal government, shackled by the convertibility system, fought to restrict revenue-sharing and reduce the fiscal deficit. The stage was set for a clash that would erupt the moment the economy turned down.

For the time being, however, political stability was preserved. Menem succeeded in reconciling neoliberalism with the forms of representative democracy, minimizing—although not altogether avoiding—resort to authoritarian means. He became the first president since Perón to serve out a six-year term; in 1995, having rewritten the constitution, he won re-election for a further four years.

External shocks

As Menem commenced his second term, however, Argentina was emerging shaken from the first big blow to its economic model. By December 1994, a sharp rise in US interest rates had provoked a world bond-market crash and devaluation of the Mexican peso. The popularity of emerging markets plummeted. Capital fled Latin America. Stock prices fell sharply on the Buenos Aires Bolsa as the Tequila effect hit. The Argentine economy lurched into recession, unemployment soaring from 12 to 18 per cent in scarcely six months. Capital flight and falling reserves created fears as to whether the convertibility of the peso could survive. The subsequent run on the banks—18 per cent of deposits lost within weeks—raised anxieties about the strength of the banking system as a whole, and forced some provincial closures. GDP contracted by 7.6 per cent from the last quarter of 1994 to the first quarter of 1996.

Menem and Cavallo’s currency-board system was kept intact. Foreign-debt repayments were guaranteed by the Central Bank’s reserves, with the government offering to rebuild these, if necessary, through additional privatization measures—although by now there was little left to sell. Political friends—Pérez Companc and others—rallied round to support the peso. Speculators held fire. Alarmed by the repercussions of the Mexican crisis, the US lowered its interest rates somewhat. Argentina appeared to have weathered the storm. But the cost of financing the budgetary deficit—which grew from $1.3 billion in 1995 to $5.6 billion in 1996, with falling revenues and rising interest payments—had set the country on the first turn of the rising debt spiral that would culminate in the massive default of December 2001. Through the late 1990s, rising external interest rates would lead to growing debt-service costs, which in turn would amplify the debt and thus entail the still higher rates imposed on the country as a ‘risk premium’; with the entire deficit being hugely magnified, as noted above, by the effects of the currency-convertibility system. The small deficit of previous years, mainly a result of the partial privatization of social security, began to yawn. [29]

Temporarily, however, the appreciation of the Brazilian real—Cardoso had raised interest rates to nearly 65 per cent, in response to the Tequila crisis—came to the rescue of the Argentine economy, by creating a big pull from its main export market. [30] But recovery remained tenuous. Argentine exports still consisted mainly of low-value primary goods. Half the new jobs that now appeared were temporary ones, signalling an increase in cuentapropismo. At this stage, too, the social problems of regional decline and unemployment became more obtrusive. The bank failures of 1995 had a disastrous effect on regional finance in some parts of the country, leading to plummeting standards of public health and education. Provincial leaders demanded more resources. In mid-1996 Cavallo resigned over a row about health spending, to be replaced by Roque Fernández.

Revenues from privatization were exhausted. Foreign investment stagnated. Further hikes in US interest rates brought higher debt-service costs, swelling the deficit. Crucially, from early 1996 the US dollar also began to rise. Its appreciation became the turning point for the world economy in the 1990s—the ‘death knell for those peripheral economies that had tied their currencies to the dollar’. Increasingly towards the end of the decade, ‘the US would absorb all the world’s mobile capital. In this situation, countries that had staked everything on attracting foreign investment were up against the wall’. [31] In early 1997, US interest rates rose again. The upward lurch in foreign-debt payments spread panic, capital flight and then collapse through much of Southeast Asia. A year later, in August 1998, Russia defaulted on its debt. By then, the Argentine economy had fallen into recession. Contrary to the picture the IMF has painted, the government ran a primary budget surplus through most of the period—but the rising interest costs of the debt pushed it into deficit.

Exports, meanwhile, still depended on the continuing over-valuation of the dollar-pegged Brazilian real. In January 1999, this came under ferocious speculative attack. Cardoso’s government was obliged to abandon the exchange-rate anchor of the Plano Real and allow the currency to devalue. It appeared imperative that Argentina should follow. The Brazilian market was contracting fast. The convertibility system, tying the peso to the rising dollar, was devastating exports. Why did Argentina not allow the peso to fall? Certainly, there was political pressure from the country’s large middle class, who did not want their savings depleted. But this was reinforced by support from the IMF and US Treasury. The country, as a leading Fund official put it, had ‘faithfully applied’ its lessons, and its ‘performance was recognized internationally, with President Menem’s appearance alongside President Clinton at the 1999 annual meetings of the Fund and Bank’. [32] At this stage, Menem even proposed reinforcing the fixed currency through all-out dollarization.

At the same time, blighted provinces were showing signs of exhaustion with neoliberal policies. The unemployed piqueteros had begun their roadblock protests, with support from the CTA and radical groups such as the Corriente Clasista Combativa. Faced with growing popular discontent, provincial administrations—led by Buenos Aires—slightly increased their public-sector employment, which rose from 1,223,000 in 1996 to 1,318,000 in 1999, rather than instituting the redundancies demanded by the federal government.

Return of the Radicals

Menem’s domestic support was beginning to fray. The Justicialista party was racked by regionally inflected internal conflicts, pitting the president against his heir apparent, Eduardo Duhalde (vice-president in the early 1990s, before becoming governor of Buenos Aires). Menem tested the water for a further constitutional reform that would allow him to run for a third term but found little support; longstanding charges of corruption and abuse of authority were resonating more strongly.

In October 1997, sensing the exhaustion of menemismo, Argentina’s oldest party, the Radicals, had united with Frepaso—one of its newest— to form the Alianza. Frepaso was itself a coalition of centre-left groups and, like the Radicals, largely middle-class in composition. Its main constituency lay in the city of Buenos Aires. Its leader Carlos ‘Chacho’ Alvarez was a teacher and former Peronist, who had quit the Justicialistas in 1993 in protest against school decentralization and privatization. Although united against Menem, the free-market Radicals and progressive frepasistas had sharply contrasting orientations. Alvarez, an able communicator, lectured against ‘globalization’, while another leading figure, Graciela Fernández Meijide, defended protectionist positions—a heresy for the Radicals.

Fernando De la Rúa, the Alianza figurehead, was known as a conciliator and vote-winner rather than a man of strong ideas. A veteran Radical from Córdoba, he had nationwide credentials and could expect strong support from the provinces in gubernatorial elections. He was currently serving as elected mayor of the newly established Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, where his unblemished, if unspectacular, record also promised victory against the divided Peronists. He was considered safe, stable and untainted by corruption.

De la Rúa and his running mate Alvarez squared off against a Peronist ticket headed by Duhalde in the presidential election of October 1999. Advised by Clinton’s Dick Morris, the Alianza campaign glossed over the crisis that faced the country and offered a saccharine programme of moderate liberalism and clean government, with vague promises of better health and education. Under Morris’s direction, De la Rúa stressed his personal reputation for reliability and stability, declaring he was ‘proud to be boring’. On the economy José Luis Machinea, head of the Central Bank under Alfonsín and a key member of De la Rúa’s team, was a strong advocate of convertibility (the question of how far the frepasistas would go in this direction was brushed aside). Machinea was sympathetic to the dollarization proposals that Menem had been floating, but argued that this would require prior ‘structural reform’ to eliminate the state deficit and ‘free’ the labour market. [33] Yet room for manoeuvre was shrinking fast. Revenue was falling, along with demand and consumption, while debt-swollen deficits grew. As one ajuste, or spending cut, led to another, the economy pitched further on down.

The Justicialistas were divided. As a bonaerense, Duhalde enjoyed little support from the Peronist provincial governors and none at all from Menem. On the stump, he hinted at a willingness to devalue, and even to default on the foreign debt—leading to accusations that he was merely rewarding his Gran Buenos Aires cronies, the manufacturers and trade unions who stood to benefit if competition from imported goods declined. The Peronists never managed to transcend public opposition to abandoning convertibility—and Menem continued to agitate for dollarization.

The subsequent, narrow victory of the Alianza in December 1999 reflected the divisions of the Peronist camp rather than support for De la Rúa; the Peronists retained a large majority in Congress and the provinces. The new government’s single aim was to attract more foreign investment, to service, while exacerbating, the debt requirement. According to Machinea, that meant both shoring up the fixed currency and wringing out the fiscal deficit, although this was only a modest 2.4 per cent of GDP. The administration’s attempts to reduce coparticipación funds in order to cut provincial spending, however, were thwarted by Peronist governors and Congress, resulting in political stalemate. Taxes were raised and cuts imposed, but the fiscal saving—an overall 2 per cent of GDP—was dwarfed by the increase in debt-service costs. There was still no sign of recovery. Flexibilización measures—including the abolition of centralized collective bargaining and an end to employers’ contributions to union-run health funds—again met resistance in Congress. Reports circulated of a government attempt to bribe Peronist senators to support the legislation. Alvarez resigned as vice-president, having served for only nine months. The Alianza persisted only in name.

After the bubble

Time had run out. From April 2000, the downturn on Wall Street signalled the end of the US boom and the onset of a grave deterioration in the world economy. Capital flew out of the country as predictions grew that Argentina faced a ‘hard landing’. The deficit worsened, despite spending cuts. By November 2000, default was looming. The government turned to the IMF for emergency assistance. The Fund set conditions of draconian fiscal austerity. If these were met, a huge loan, totalling almost $40 billion, would be made available to prop up the currency-convertibility system.

The severe retrenchment demanded by the IMF merely accentuated the negative effects of deflation, deepening the recession, accelerating capital flight and increasing the likelihood of eventual default. To require the enfeebled De la Rúa government to combat spending in the Peronists’ provincial strongholds only exacerbated the risks of political breakdown. In a desperate search for spending cuts, the administration raised the age of retirement for women and reduced the minimum state pension. A public-works programme to reduce unemployment and revive consumption, announced at the beginning of 2001, remained stillborn. Machinea resigned in early March, having failed to push through further reductions. Ricardo López Murphy, the neoliberal economist who replaced him, duly declared war on the provinces’ welfare and employment programmes, but met with a solid front of opposition from the Peronist governors of Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Santa Fe. López Murphy shifted his focus to higher education, no doubt hoping to find a softer target, only to encounter the collective fury of the university students. Three weeks after taking office, he resigned.

De la Rúa now brought back Menem’s finance minister, Cavallo, who—after an initial shot at tax cuts—tried to implement the old fiscal-austerity recipe of higher taxes and spending reductions. In June, he sought to negotiate a delay on foreign-debt interest payments through a ‘mega-swap’ of some $32 billion. In a covert attempt at devaluation, Cavallo then proposed re-setting the convertibility level at a rate based on a basket of lower-value European currencies; this was spotted at once, and rejected by Congress. In July, Radicals prevented a further cut in pensions.

As depositors emptied their bank accounts and safety-deposit boxes, De la Rúa appeared resigned to Armageddon: ‘I give my life to the fight,’ he vowed in July 2001: ‘I will never devalue.’ [34] The IMF now demanded that the government achieve a zero fiscal deficit as the condition for a further loan of $8 billion; it targeted the increase in provincial public-sector employment—up 35,000 between 1999 and 2000, by the Fund’s own figures—as a major ‘fiscal problem’ and symptom of ‘public-sector bloat’. In October 2001, mid-term elections revealed the public’s disorientation and disillusionment. The Alianza vote collapsed; the Peronists’ increased (bringing Duhalde into the Senate) but the biggest jump was the 4 million people who cast blank ballots. [35] Withdrawals from bank deposits reached $500 million per day in late November, and a staggering $1 billion per day in early December. It was in these circumstances that Cavallo instituted the corralito. Backing for De la Rúa now vanished completely. Defence of convertibility was no longer possible. The popular uprisings of December 2001 saw De la Rúa’s flight, devaluation and the historic debt default.

What balance sheet can be drawn from Argentina’s long decade of neoliberalism? Promises of a new economy funded by foreign capital clearly proved a mirage. Unemployment soared, and high-value export sectors failed to materialize. Privatization, thanks in part to the oligopoly of the domestic conglomerates, has not even brought efficiency—as the Financial Times has noted, Argentina has been one of the world’s most expensive places to do business. [36] Deficits were supposed to cease with the ending of state subsidies to national industries; instead, they were swollen by the rising costs of foreign debt. The currency-convertibility system drastically exacerbated these problems through its deleterious effects on exports and deficits. If the central planks of the Washington Consensus produced unemployment, regional blight and rising inequality, it was the fixed exchange rate that, with the rising dollar, provided the extra turn of the screw, the extreme severity of Argentina’s millennial crisis.

The IMF supported the fixed-rate system to the tune of tens of billions of dollars right to the bitter end. It still claims that the root cause of Argentina’s crisis was fiscal mismanagement, and that insufficient flexibility in the labour market was the real problem undermining the currency regime. It has been particularly outraged by recent acts of Congress—extending a ban on mortgage foreclosures and the seizure of debtors’ cars; reinstituting employers’ payments to a trade-union run health scheme; claiming that foreign banks’ head offices should be responsible for new deposits in their Argentine branches. As a result, it is now demanding ‘political consensus’—the ultimate fiat—for any deal. [37]

It is not yet clear what the contents of such an agreement might be. Will it provide real resources for reviving the economy, or merely put Argentina into ‘a type of receivership’ in which slow growth, permanently high interest rates and an unsustainable debt burden cause the country to limp along from one crisis to the next? Argentina might do better to pursue a non-IMF alternative. The crisis of the last year has already altered the economy’s coordinates. An effective devaluation of around 72 per cent has made the export sector vastly more competitive and, with the collapse in imports, expanded its share of the overall economy from 11.5 to 37 per cent. As a result, there is now a current-account surplus. Could Argentina take its own steps to recovery—declare a moratorium on the debt, institute a broad-based public-works programme, work directly with private banks in Brazil, for example, to arrange for letters of credit that would allow exports to expand more rapidly? [38]

In July 2002, with political support slipping away from him, Duhalde declared that the country needed an elected rather than an appointed leader, and announced that he would bring the next presidential elections forward to March 2003. Peronists are currently squabbling over who should succeed him. Menem attempted yet another comeback, but met with such a torrent of abuse that he was forced to retire. Carlos Reutemann, governor of Santa Fe and a former Formula One racing champion, has so far declined to run, but might reconsider if he had the support of the IMF. The Córdoba governor, José Manuel De la Sota, has meanwhile proffered himself as next best.

The dissident Radical congresswoman Elisa Carrió has emerged as a leftish alternative, having gained a reputation as a scourge of corruption. Like Leandro Alem, who came to the fore during the Baring Crisis, Carrió has succeeded in surrounding herself with an aura of transcendent integrity. Opinion polls in the spring of 2002 showed her as the country’s most popular politician—perhaps the head of a mass movement comparable to the radicalismo of a century ago. Had they considered the parallel more closely, Carrió’s followers might not wish for an exact replay of the events of the 1890s. The Radicals then suffered fraud at the polls, and took another twenty-six years to reach office. Alem proved a brilliant rhetorician but a flawed leader; his career ended in suicide. Honesty alone may once again prove insufficient to forge a path out of the abyss. But as a preliminary step, it seems essential for Argentines to recognize how, during the course of the 1990s, they were led into it.

[1] I would like to acknowledge the assistance of colleagues at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, who bear no responsibility for the views expressed in this article.

[2] For colourful details of Rodríguez Saá’s career—including his kidnap, in a plot connived at by his mistress—see Miguel Wiñazki, El último feudo. San Luis y el caudillismo de los Rodríguez Saá, Buenos Aires 1995.

[3] In parts of Gran Buenos Aires, ‘the subsidies fell into the hands of non-governmental organizations directly controlled by a political party or piquetero group’: La Nación, 2 April 2002. See also Clarín, 18 April 2002 and 18 July 2002.

[4] Economist, 14 June 1997.

[5] So far, despite the piqueteros and the asambleas populares, the political momentum appears much weaker in 2002.

[6] In the 19th century, La Rioja had been famous as the bastion of two of Argentina’s most colourful caudillos, Juan Facundo Quiroga and Angel Vicente Peñaloza. Opposing forces of Liberals killed Peñaloza and defeated the last of the gaucho cavalry forces, the Montonera, in the 1860s. The province then lapsed into obscurity, remote and largely forgotten. Arid and undeveloped, it remains one of the poorest in Argentina.

[7] Latinamerica Press, 25 May 1989. On the context of Menem’s policies, see María Victoria Murillo, Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions and Market Reforms in Latin America, New York 2001.

[8] See Felipe de la Balze, Remaking the Argentine Economy, New York 1995; Robert Solomon, Money on the Move. The Revolution in International Finance since 1980, Princeton 1999, p. 45; on trade unions, see María Victoria Murillo, ‘Union Politics, Market-Oriented Reforms, and the Reshaping of Argentine Corporatism’, in Douglas Chalmers et al., eds, The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America, New York 1997.

[9] See Pablo Bustos, ed., Más allá de la estabilidad. Argentina en la época de la globalización y la regionalización, Buenos Aires 1995, p. 11.

[10] Peter Waldmann, ‘The Peronism of Perón and Menem: From Justicialism to Liberalism?’, in Colin Lewis and Nissa Torrents, eds, Argentina in the Crisis Years (1983–90), London 1993, p. 98.

[11] ECLAC, Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean 1994, Santiago 1995, p. 141.

[12] World Bank, Argentina. From Insolvency to Growth, Washington, DC 1993, p. 128.

[13] Luigi Manzetti, Privatization South American Style, London 1999, p. 93.

[14] Daniel Muchnik, País archipiélago. Las consecuencias del modelo político-económico del gobierno de Menem, Buenos Aires 1993, p. 54.

[15] World Bank, Argentina, 1993, p. xii; see also William Smith, ‘Hyperinflation, Macroeconomic Instability, and Neoliberal Restructuring in Democratic Argentina’, in E. Epstein, ed., The New Argentine Democracy, Westport 1992, p. 57. For a favourable view: World Bank, Argentina’s Privatization Program, Washington, DC 1993.

[16] ECLAC, Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean 1994, p. 131.

[17] Bernardo Kosacoff, ‘La industria argentina, un proceso de reestructuración desarticulada’, in Bustos, ed., Estabilidad, pp. 93–128.

[18] Página 12, 11 January 1999 shows the following figures for per capita income for the poorest 20 per cent of the population (Argentine jurisdictions in italics): United States $6000; Gran Buenos Aires $864; Bangladesh $613; Corrientes $510; Salta $468; Nepal $464; Jujuy $400. For the provinces, see Alejandro Rofman, ‘Las economías regionales: un proceso de decadencia estructural’, in Bustos, ed., Estabilidad, pp. 159–89.

[19] Kosacoff, ‘Industria’, p. 109; ECLAC, Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean 1996, Santiago 1997, p. 72. For a sceptical view, see Atilio Borón, ‘Argentina’s Neoliberal Reforms’, in Leslie Armijo, ed., Conversations on Democratization and Economic Reform, Los Angeles 1994, p. 244.

[20] The 1991 measure fell short of ‘dollarization’ by allowing a national currency—just as the gold standard did not require an exclusive use of gold coins. This one-step-below dollarization allowed the investment of dollar reserves, yielding the revenue known as seignorage. See also Alec Ford, The Gold Standard 1880–1914: Britain and Argentina, Oxford 1962.

[21] Nissan Leviatan, ed., Proceedings of a Conference on Currency Substitution and Currency Boards, World Bank Discussion Papers 207, Washington, DC 1993, p. 9.

[22] Juan Carlos Torre, 24 July 2002 (personal communication).

[23] ‘Argentina en el Desfile de la Victoria’, Cronista Comercial, 11 June 1991, cited in Wendy Hunter, ‘State and Soldier in Latin America’, Chapter 2, United States Institute of Peace, October 1996: www.usip.org

[24] ECLAC, Economic Survey 1994, p. 68.

[25] Balze, Remaking the Argentine Economy, p. 109; Murillo, Labor Unions, pp. 131, 170. In September 2002, the IMF is still waiting for flexibilización measures it would consider adequate.

[26] Murillo, Labor Unions, p. 164.

[27] Jeremy Adelman, ‘Post-Peronist Argentina’, NLR I/203, January–February 1994.