President Kirchner. Flickr/Ministerio de Cultura de la Nacion
Many South American countries are currently going through a period of so-called post neo-liberalism, a quest to re-establish the state as the principal mechanism of social integration. The path chosen, however, has varied in many respects, one of which is exemplified by nationalisation. Argentina, Venezuela and Bolivia all deployed measures to change company ownership, but each country’s policy was based on its own particular rationale. Venezuela directly expropriated and nationalised hundreds of private businesses that had not been previously privatised, the impetus to do so having been very weak during the 1990s. Bolivia undertook nationalisation of strategic sectors, most importantly hydrocarbons and telecommunications, a policy Evo Morales had anticipated during in his presidential campaign. It also took over four power companies and a metallurgy plant. Brazil, Ecuador and Uruguay, on the other hand, reasserted state control in the economy but not through significant nationalisation.
Argentina’s case is noteworthy in this regard. It begins back in the early 90s with the Freudian slip of erstwhile Minister of Public Works Roberto Dromi, who, on unveiling his privatisation plan, famously declared that nothing that should belong to the state would remain in state hands. So began the sale of an unprecedented number of state-owned assets. Radio, television, telephone, tolls, roads and railways, and the national airline passed into private hands along with steel, petrochemicals, shipbuilding, electricity and hydroelectric plants, oil and gas, mortgage lending, and social security. Not for nothing was the country considered the IMF’s top student. The neoliberal explosion of 2001 inaugurated a new period, in which private enterprises were not renationalised across the board but on a case-by-case basis. For the most part, this occurred in response to poor management that jeopardized the businesses in question and sometimes, in a more indirect manner, the nation’s socio-economic stability.
