1 - Politics, Culture and Film in 1990s Argentina

Summary

The 1990s in Argentina were strongly associated with the government of Peronist Carlos Saúl Menem (Partido Justicialista, or PJ, 1989–99) and with the country’s full adoption and consolidation of neoliberal policies, which is regarded by many as a continuation of the socio-economic project of the dictatorship that had governed the country between 1976 and 1983. Daniel García Delgado notes that from 1945 until the mid-1970s, the welfare state held a strategic vision of the economy. Light industrialisation through an import substitution industrialisation (ISI) programme, and prioritisation of the domestic market through the introduction of higher salaries, defined Argentine economy and society during the period. For Mario Rapoport, despite its several crises (which were linked to the external front and inflationary processes), Argentina’s industrial base enjoyed significant growth right up until the mid-1970s. However, the military regime that seized power with the 1976 coup viewed industrialisation and the accompanying high worker salaries as the origin of social and political conflict. So, the junta's ‘solution’ was to disrupt the country's social and economic structure while eradicating revolutionary groups and suppressing any form of protest. In the post-dictatorship period, Raúl Alfonsín's government (UCR, 1983–89) made several institutional advances, such as the state trials of the military. However, it did not go as far as to reorient the economic strategy imposed during the dictatorship. Social instability, fuelled by economic, military and political power groups, pressured Alfonsín to call for early presidential elections to counteract the exorbitant rates of inflation, which had reached 4923.6 per cent in 1989.

Alfonsín's successor, the Peronist Carlos Menem, turned away dramatically from the policies typical of Peronism and instigated some of the measures that would prove most important in defining the neoliberal decade (1989–2001). However, it took him almost two years to stabilise the economy. In 1991 Menem and his newly appointed Economy minister Domingo Cavallo passed a Convertibility Law in Congress, which pegged the new Argentine peso to the US dollar. Today it is widely agreed that the de-industrialisation process commenced by the dictatorship was completed during the early 1990s and accomplished largely as a response to the difficulties Argentine society faced in repositioning itself in relation to the ever-changing global context. This process gathered speed during the period of hyperinflation, and concluded with the liberalisation of the economy and the introduction of a widespread programme of privatisation.