ABSTRACT
In the immediate postwar period, the controversy moved to the political level, since many of the old measures that the industrialists were demanding had already begun to be applied (with the first industrial promotion law or the creation of the Industrial Bank) under the military government. Strictly speaking, when Peron took office in 1946, the ideas of nationalism and economic interventionism deployed since the 1930s, as well as the concern for the social question, were combined with the need to boost manufacturing activities for social and political reasons: to sustain a high level of employment and avoid the social conflict that would result from the recovery of international trade with the end of the war. The ideas on industry that underlayed the first definitions of economic policy were in line with Bungist postulates, far from a significant development of basic industries and from the extreme nationalist perspectives. In fact, although Peronism also took up the ideas of those military promoters of activities linked to “national defense,” concrete advances in this sense were moderate until 1949, while the possibilities of resorting to the importation of industrial inputs, goods, and equipment remained open.
