"Building a Managerial Epic for Argentina's Center-Right", panel "The Rise of Right Parties in Latin America"

GABRIEL VOMMARO

Boston

Congreso; APSA Annual Meeting; 2018

APSA

Businessmen have historically been unlikely to directly participate in politics in Latin America. Until the 1980s, they delegated the establishment of market oriented reforms to the military. From then on, they preferred to establish direct relations with governments, exercising influence in relation to policies that directly affect their sector. In short, they exhibited fragmented, particularistic, and reactive political participation. In this context, I analyze the important mobilization of managers and CEOS around the current government of Cambiemos, in Argentina, dominated by the center-right party Republican Proposal (PRO). More than 30 percent of the top positions in the government are held by people who previously held senior management positions in a private firm. The paper intends to reconstruct the process of political mobilization of these actors that took place in the final years of center-left rule in Argentina. The argument is that this mobilization was favored by an organizational mechanism, efficient in a particular context: the construction of party mediations through NGOs that sought to recruit and organize managers in a context of a "moral panic" in the business world regarding a possible "chavización" of Argentina, which generated a sense of fear and urgency among its members. The entrance of these managerial elites to the State reveals a transformation of the historical pattern of linkage between businessmen and politics in Argentina, as well as the renovation of Argentine political elites.