El Fondo Monetario y el Banco Mundial en la Argentina: Liberalismo, populismo y finanzas internacionales

Abstract

The role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in the economic development of Argentina has aroused a considerable amount of controversy. However, as Raúl García Heras states in his deeply researched book, we lacked a fully elaborated historical account based on archival records of the relationship since 1955 between the South American nation and the two most important international financial agencies. García Heras offers in his work a rich empirical analysis based on an impressive array of sources, such as the archives of the IMF and the World Bank, British and American diplomatic records, private papers from important Argentine economic policy makers, and many others. His main thesis is that the IMF and the World Bank have played a major role in Argentine development, since both institutions became the final guarantors of Argentina’s economic seriousness, conditioning in that way the nation’s access to international financial markets. Moreover, the IMF and the World Bank interventions in Argentina were guided by a version of economic orthodoxy that ultimately ended in failure.García Heras renders a complex account of the relationship between the IMF and the World Bank’s bureaucrats and Argentine politicians. He argues persuasively that the commitment of the IMF to reform Argentine economic policy was to some extent related to the international agency’s search for a propaganda victory and use of Argentina as an example to show the world. However, the importance of Argentina for the IMF might be overestimated due to the particularly “Argentine-centric” perspective adopted by the author. In fact, the rich sources employed by García Heras should have allowed him to establish broader connections and a more qualified view. I believe García Heras does not fully explore the consequences of the IMF and the World Bank being truly global agencies with global agendas and at the same time having a particular relationship with the United States.The author accurately emphasizes the link between IMF influence and Argentina’s difficulties in dealing with European creditors (the so-called Club of Paris), but he misses some other, no less fundamental connections. For example, in the “Preludio,” García Heras underlines several conditions that prevented Argentina from joining the IMF at the end of World War II. Most of these conditions were related to the internal situation of Argentina and in particular to Juan Domingo Perón’s nationalistic regime. Thus, a little-known attempt to establish relationships between the international financial agencies and Perón’s government failed due to the fact that “Peronism did not have the political strength, the managerial capacity, the technical cadres, and the ideological conviction necessary to deepen that reorientation” (p. 18). But nothing is said about the place of Argentina in the global design envisioned by the Allies and the United States after the war, and how this was related to the international financial system. Moreover, the very attempt of Perón’s government to obtain aid from the international agencies deserves further attention.The overall impression is that the IMF and the World Bank were monolithic structures. García Heras sometimes notes the internal disputes among bureaucrats but he does not consider the possibility of evolution within these institutions. For instance, apparently the shift from Eisenhower to Kennedy, from the rhetoric of “trade not aid” to the “Alliance for the Progress,” did not influence IMF attitudes and policies. This might be so, but a discussion about the reasons for the persistence of practices and ideas would not have been out of place.The problems of a lack of historical contextualization beyond Argentine borders arise more clearly at the end of the book in the analysis of the 1966 – 69 period. García Heras argues that this was the end of an era, but the reasons for that are not obvious. Was it due to the “Cordobazo,” the social turbulence that put an end to Krieger Vasena’s period in charge of Argentine economic policy? Or was it due to Argentina’s temporary break in dependence on IMF aid? Or perhaps to the referred “upheavals in capital markets that foretold the end of the monetary and financial system established since 1945?” (p. 179). By heeding a broader historical context, García Heras might have offered alternative explanations for the relationship between international financial agencies and Argentina and the differences that he mentions in his conclusions — contradicting his portrait of the IMF as stubbornly committed to the same policies — between the not “so orthodox” attitudes of the fifties and sixties and strict orthodoxy in the aftermath of the Washington Consensus.Nonetheless, and despite its flaws, El Fondo Monetario offers in-depth historical research that will enhance our understanding of both Argentine recent history and the debatable interventions of international agencies in Latin America.