The World Bank's Structural Adjustment Lending and Argentina's Neoliberal Turn, 1989–91

This article examines the World Bank's (WB) use of structural adjustment lending (SAL) in Argentina during 1989–91, when President Carlos Menem launched a far-reaching neoliberal transformation. Drawing on recently declassified WB files and Argentine and US primary sources, it analyzes the intensive negotiations that led to the WB's first adjustment loans to Menem's administration and to the granting of an unprecedented number of loans to the country. The article advances four main arguments. First, it challenges portrayals of adjustment as externally imposed by demonstrating Argentina's agency, showing that national policymakers actively pursued WB's SAL to finance, legitimize, and promote a domestically designed neoliberal agenda. Second, it demonstrates that SAL not only reshaped Argentina's economic structure and thinking but also facilitated the WB's institutional expansion and deeper involvement in transformative structural reforms. Third, it situates SAL within a WB–Argentina–US triangle that reconfigured responsibility for managing the debt crisis and blurred earlier divisions of labor between the WB and the International Monetary Fund. Fourth, it exposed tensions between executive-driven reform and democratic accountability in Argentina's post-authoritarian transition.