ABSTRACT
The period 1966-1976 was characterized by systematic state intervention in the economy with a view to encouraging the development of the more capital-intensive branches of industry, and this state intervention intensified the structural restrictions intrinsic to the prevailing model of industrial development. Speculative accumulation of subsidized industrial imports, along with the scarcity of the agricultural products, and the drop in meat exports that occurred with the closing off of the European Common Market had an adverse repercussion on the balance of trade and, from the beginning of 1975 onward, resulted in a crisis in the foreign sector. The wage policy of the period was developed with the active participation of the union elite, who controlled the general confederation of labor and even the Labor Ministry. The growing loss of credibility on the part of the governing elite, in the framework of an unresolved political crisis, would prepare the groundwork for the military coup of 1976.
