ABSTRACT
The state is impersonal: The Argentine only grasps personal relationships. That is why, for the Argentine, to steal from the government is not a crime. The Argentine historian Carlos Waisman poses the puzzle, broadly, in this way: The country's economic and political development has been curvilinear. The century 1880-1980 can be divided into two halves, whose characteristics are sharply different. But when Waisman says that Argentina was "a relatively stable liberal democracy" until 1930, he is off the mark. In 1930, with economic hard times intensifying, the seventy-eight-year-old and probably senile Yrigoyen was overthrown by the military, supported by the oligarchy. Argentina's history between 1930 and 1982 might aptly be described as going from bad to worse to disaster. The Argentines refer to the Falklands as the Malvinas Islands and, the irresponsibility and opportunism of the Argentine military notwithstanding, it soon became fashionable in US intellectual circles to substitute Malvinas for Falklands.
