ABSTRACT
The state in Latin America has appeared to be in full retreat since Chile introduced pioneering structural adjustment policies in the mid-1970s and economic restructuring spread to other countries during the 1980s. The proximate source of the change in prevailing policy was in virtually every instance a compelling one: namely, economic breakdown. In Argentina, too, the forces of resistance remained strong throughout the Alfonsin period, when the Radical government was clearly sympathetic to the old modalities of economic nationalism. In retrospect, the denouement of the 1980s appears to have been built into the modus operandi of Latin American economic systems from very nearly their inception. Reregulation in public finance has become, in effect, the point of departure for establishing sound macroeconomic management. The very weakness of the state and the political system through which it operated made the apparatus of public power vulnerable to the ambitions of the varied social forces, which were only partly captured.
