Abstract
SIAM-Di Tella, once Latin America's greatest industrial conglomerate, has long been considered by historians of Argentina to be a company whose fortunes served as a cautionary tale on the country's industrialization. The firm's size and importance were so great that it even merited consideration by an eminent American business historian and an Argentine social scientist in the 1960s, when dependency and modernization theories competed as explanatory paradigms for Latin American underdevelopment. This tension was revealed in their collaboration: Thomas C. Cochran and Rubén Reina, "Capitalism in Argentine Culture: A Study of Torcuato Di Tella and S.I.A.M." Whereas Cochran and Reina tended to celebrate SIAM-Di Tella's accomplishments while also noting its inability to stay competitive at the international level, a new book on the firm's history by Marcelo Rougier and Jorge Schvarzer stresses its failures and inexorable demise, culminating with the company's complete liquidation in 1994 at the height of President Carlos Menem's neo-liberal restructuring program.
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