ABSTRACT

The populist facade concealed a tremendous amount of tugging and hauling among competing interest groups unable to purge each other. This stalemated pluralism has increasingly assumed the character of a latent civil war. A big chunk of earnings accumulated from foreign trade during World War II was invested in the equipment of light consumer industries. The differential between the internal and external prices of the meat, grain, and other products that were thus traded gave the government a handsome profit, used to facilitate credit to the national industrialists. The marginal work force was being absorbed by industrial expansion. Any step toward a serious transformation of the economic order beyond income redistribution and consumer-based industrialization implied tightening the political controls and most likely the transformation of the populist regime into a progressive but more rigid dictatorship. The development of consumer goods industries had reduced consumer imports.