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Sure, but why? Since 1945 doctrinaire Peronism (and so not Menem) has been in power for what? 30 years? I would put Peron himself, the Kirchners and Fernandez under the label of doctrinaire Peronism. The rest of the time has been spent under various anti Peronist juntas or neoliberal administrations. Argentina has certainly not been deprived of free market experiments and it is hard to chalk up all of it’s long term developmental problems to one set of policies.
I am not particularly interested in defending Peronism, but a central assumption in the anti peronist narrative is that Argentina has some kind of neglected potential that was robbed from it by statist economics. That is, it should be notably richer than the rest of Latin America, as it was at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1900 Argentina was a massive country full of good land with a very small population. It had among the top 10 highest GDP per capita on the planet. Today Argentina is a country of 40 million in a world where no country whose primary industry is agriculture will ever rank very high among the top economies. Let us remember that in 1900 there was only a small club of highly industrialized countries.
Argentina is a dysfunctional middle income country with regular crisis and high inflation. It alternates between free market reforms and left wing populism at regular intervals. It is a fairly normal Latin American country.
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