From state building to state capture

In Chapter 3 (“From State Building to State Capture”), I provide a historical account to track the origins, disposition, and configuration of Argentina’s structural corruption from colonial times to the end of the last military dictatorship. I focus on how state-building efforts turned into a 179-year period of state capture with a short kleptocratic interregnum. This quest exposes the public and private institutional weaknesses that underlie corruption: political instability, authoritarianism, a lack of checks and balances, patrimonialism, corporatism, and a marked concentration of both political and economic power.