18
public schools and hospitals to the municipalities, and subsequently denying them sufficient
resources through the extremely centralized control of municipal finances, was a means of
encouraging the “voluntary” shift toward the private provision of these services.
16
One of
the key complaints of mayors in the post-military period is that they must now provide a
more daunting array of services without sufficient revenues. This structural imbalance
directly reflects the neoliberal origins of the move to redesign subnational institutions in
Chile’s authoritarian period.
Statism and Neoliberalism in Argentina
While military governments in Brazil and Chile can be distinguished by their pursuit
of statist and neoliberal projects respectively, the relative coherence of military governments
in both countries differed sharply from the Argentine cases. The seven-year Revolución
Argentina and Proceso regimes were fraught with disputes between and within the different
services of the armed forces over the proper economic policy orientation. In particular,
economic liberals (ortodoxos) who maintained close ties with transnational capital and sought
to reduce state intervention repeatedly clashed with economic nationalists who favored
preferences for domestic industry and defended trade protection (Peralta-Ramos 1990,
Smith 1989). This lack of cohesion significantly hindered “the ability of the new governing
elite to put forward a vision of a new political order and to design the institutions that would
embody this vision (Munck 1998, 10).” The incoherence and volatility that resulted at the
national level can be clearly seen to have spilled over into the provincial arena. While the
need to alter subnational institutions was never as well-developed in Argentina as it was in
16
Author interview with Jorge Caro, Chief, Division of Regionalization Policy; Subsecretariat for Regional
Convention