CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The economic program of the economic team led by Minister Martínez de Hoz during the last military dictatorship of 1976-83 in Argentina have long attracted academic, journalistic and political interest. One of its major topics of discussion has been Argentina?s international financial relations and how they resulted in a heavy national indebtedness that conditioned the economic outlook of the country and the economic policies of an incoming constitutional government when it assumed power in December 1983. Economists and political scientists have analyzed these issues, and the responsibilities of multilateral financial institutions and major banks in the build-up and consequences of national foreign indebtedness, particularly after the outbreak of the Latin American foreign debt crisis in 1982. However, the opening of archives in Britain and the United States offers economic historians a unique chance to make further inroads on these topics, broach mistaken assumptions, and link the Martínez de Hoz economic plan with the previous Peronist administration of 1973-76 This paper therefore intends to examine the origins and early development of the ?international dimension? of the Martínez de Hoz economic plan. The discussion will also consider the relationship between these links and relatively orthodox monetary and credit policies applied by the Central Bank, and how the Argentine economic team harmonized relations with ?old guard? bankers dating from the Bretton Woods era with more recent international banking procedures emerging after the recycling of oil revenues of the 1970s. It will draw heavily on archival materials from the IMF, the World Bank, Argentina?s Central Bank, the National Archives of the United States in College Park, and the Public Records Office in London.