ABSTRACT
After the failure of the economic policy implemented by the third Peronist government, the bloody dictatorship beginning in 1976 opened the door for a set of policies in line with the neoliberal ideas that were gaining currency throughout the world. The ministry of José Martínez de Hoz ended an historical cycle that—for decades—had placed industry at the heart of the Argentine economic strategy. The military government had detrimental effects for both the economy and society, putting an end to Argentina’s “short industrial twentieth century.” Liberal economic reforms over the next five years, sustained in great measures by the accumulation of a substantial foreign debt, thwarted the potential that manufacturing had attained to overcome its structural limitations, leaving the national economy’s fortunes at the mercy of the international financial markets. It is in no way by chance—although it should not be interpreted as its cause—that the absence of important debates on industrial development in the final decades of the twentieth century coincided with the chronic stagnation of the Argentine economy and with a model that, based on the market forces and simplistic explanations, disregarded collective social welfare by dismissing the objective of developing domestic industry.
