Argentina and the IMF During the Two Bush Administrations

The economic history of Argentina from the mid-1940s, when Juan Domingo Peron came to power, to the end of the 1980s can be narrated without any significant reference to the role of the US government. However, since 1989, when Carlos Saul Menem became the first Peronist to be elected president after Peron’s death, the relationship between Argentina and the US government has been often mentioned as a key factor in the ups and downs of the Argentinian economy. Nationalism and Statism, an ideology that replaced the prevalent Market Capitalism that had dominated Argentinian politics during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, became the mainstream of political thinking during the 1930s and 1940s. By 1946, when Peron was elected president, Nationalism and Statism had become the hegemonic political force. Peron explicitly adopted an importsubstitution industrialization growth strategy and implemented populist