Development Arrested? Neoliberal Ambitions and the Limits of Authoritarianism in Argentina, 1976–81

At the end of May 1980, as Argentina faced yet another round of spiraling inflation and financial

instability, one of the country’s largest business associations, the Movimiento Industrial

Argentina, published a sharp critique of the ruling civic-military dictatorship’s economic plan,

specifically targeting the Minister of Economy, José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz. Their statement

accused the Minister of propping up inefficient sectors at the expense of efficient areas and of

failing to reduce public spending, despite the regime’s many promises to shrink the state sector.

This document exemplified a pattern of growing discontent among many of Argentina’s leading

industrialists—a pattern that remains largely understudied, but which challenges common

narratives about the link between Latin America’s right-wing authoritarian regimes of the

1970s/80s and the seemingly inevitable triumph of neoliberalism in the 1990s.

In Argentina, recent scholarship on the self-styled Process of National Reorganization (also

called the PRN; 1976-1983), has tended to emphasize the apparent continuities between

Martínez de Hoz’s right-liberal rhetoric and the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989-1999), which became emblematic of neoliberalism’s triumph in Latin America. However, in practice the PRN never achieved internal cohesion around its economic priorities, and indeed divisions among the various factions cast doubt on any narrative that suggests a causal relationship between the regime’s policies and Argentina’s future political-economic trajectory. This paper reexamines Martínez de Hoz’s tenure as Minister of Economy (1976-1981) through an analysis of criticisms not from the Left but from various sectors of the Right to illustrate both the dictatorship’s lack of a shared vision and the practical limits of its power. I suggest that, despite the prevailing story that neoliberalism was imposed in Argentina by the military during this period, Martínez de Hoz’s Economy Ministry largely failed to implement its desired free-market proposals, demanding we rethink neoliberalism’s rise a decade later.