Finally, after several false starts and two further peaks of hyperinflation, Menem put Cavallo at the helm of the Argentine Economy Ministry in February, 1991.

President Menem's Minister of Economy ( 1991 – 1996 ), Domingo Cavallo, the architect of the Menem administration's economic policies, specifically including " convertibility ", made the claim that Argentina was at that moment, " considered as the best pupil of the IMF, the World Bank and the USA government ":

Justicialist candidate Carlos Menem won the 1989 elections on a populist campaign platform, but entrusted the Ministry of Economy to the Bunge y Born company, a major agribusiness firm.

He served as adviser to the Office of the President of Argentina during the early years of the Carlos Menem administration, at the Ministry of Justice, as well as for specific international projects and other posts.

Menem also effected drastic cuts to the military budget, and appointed Lt. Gen. Martín Balza as the Army's General Chief of Staff ( head of the military hierarchy ); Balza, a man of strong democratic convictions and a vocal critic of the Falklands War, had stood up for the legitimate government in every attempted coup d ' état throughout his senior career, and gave the first institutional self-criticism about the Armed Forces ' involvement in the 1976 coup and the ensuing reign of terror.

The initiative had the political goal of reinserting the state in an oligopolic market that was completely privatized during the Menem administration in the 1990s ; these privatizations included the state oil firm YPF to the Spanish corporation Repsol, as well as its sister company, Gas del Estado, to eleven mainly foreign-owned firms.

Bunge & Born provided the Menem government with its first two economy ministers, and the combination of large rate increases on public services ( around 500 %), a simplified exchange rate and a massive, mandatory wage hike led to a sharp economic turnaround between July and November 1989.

The election of Carlos Menem to the Argentine Presidency in May 1989, however, resulted in an agreement between the President-elect and Jorge Born that gave the company partial control over national economic policy.

In 1989, Jorge Born, president of the company from 1987 ( replacing Mario Hirsch ), began working closely with the government of Carlos Menem.

After his first public accusations, relations between Cavallo, President Menem and his colleagues became progressively strained.

Between April and June 2002, Cavallo was jailed for alleged participation in illegal weapon sales during the Menem administration.

During this second turn at the Governor's desk, Menem implemented generous corporate tax exemptions, attracting the first sizable presence of light manufacturing his province had ever seen.

Critics of the policy of economic liberalization pursued during the Menem Presidency argued that Argentina's economic woes were caused by neoliberalism, which had been actively promoted by the U. S. government and the IMF under the Washington Consensus.

President Menem first had to control inflation and stabilize the economy, which he did by adopting a series of radical measures including fixed parity between the Argentine peso and the U. S. dollar.

Despite the large amount of evidence that Menem had personally profited illegally from his administration, he has never been legally convicted.

Argentina underwent heavy economic deregulation, privatization, and had a fixed exchange rate during the Menem administration ( 1989 – 1999 ).

President Menem had already privatized the state telecom concern and national airlines ( the once-premier airline in Latin America, Aerolíneas Argentinas, which was later almost run into the ground ).

This was an empty victory, as Menem was viewed very negatively by much of the Argentine population and had virtually no chance of winning the runoff election.

While associated to the clientelist and nearly feudal style of government of many provincial governors and the corruption of the PJ, Kirchner was comparatively unknown to the national public, and he showed himself as a newcomer who had arrived at the Casa Rosada without the usual whiff of scandal about him, trying not to make a point of the fact that he himself had seven times been on the same electoral ballot with Menem.

He followed the neo-liberal economic model of President Carlos Menem, including privatising the provincial bank of which his own grandfather had been a founder.

Menem claims to have had no association with the illegal weapons trade, and further adds that this is a political persecution made by Argentinean president Cristina Fernández and, her husband and also former Argentinean president, Néstor Kirchner.

It was formed in 1994 out of the Great Front ( Frente Grande ), which had been founded mainly by progressive members of the Peronist Justicialist Party who denounced the policies and the alleged corruption of the Carlos Menem administration ; the Frente joined with other dissenting Peronists, the Unidad Socialista and several other leftist parties and individuals.

Shortly after Menem won the election, the PDC left the coalition, but not before the strategy had provoked a split in its ranks.

A man of hot temper, Usandizaga had publicly promised that he would leave if Carlos Menem was elected president, as eventually happened.

A few months later, along with the News Show, he started a new program “ América Habla con Raul Peimbert ” a one-on one interview show that has allowed him to be one of the few Hispanic journalists that has interviewed more than 40 Latin American presidents, among them: Felipe Calderon Hinojosa ( Mexico ), Vicente Fox Quezada ( México ), Carlos Salinas de Gortari ( México ), Ernesto Zedillo ( México ), Carlos Saúl Menem ( Argentina ), Alberto Fujimori ( Perú ), César Gaviria ( Colombia ), Ernesto Samper ( Colombia ), Eduardo Frei ( Chile ), Ernesto Pérez Balladares ( Panamá ), Armando Calderón Sol ( El Salvador ), Rafael Caldera ( Venezuela ), Jaime Paz Zamora ( Bolivia ), Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada ( Bolivia ), Juan Carlos Wasmosy ( Paraguay ), Carlos Roberto Reina ( Honduras ), José López Portillo ( México ), Miguel De la Madrid ( México ), Joaquín Balaguer ( República Dominicana ), Antonio Saca ( El Salvador ), Daniel Ortega ( Nicaragua ), Hugo Chávez ( Venezuela ), Leonel Fernadez ( República Dominicana ), William Clinton ( USA ).

Carlos Menem of the Justicialist Party ( Peronist ) was the president for six more years and made a pact with Alfonsín in order to achieve a constitutional reform that would allow him to be reelected.

Kirchner's Frente para la Victoria ( FPV, Front for Victory ) was overwhelmingly the winner ( the candidates of the FPV got more than 40 % of the national vote ), following which many supporters of other factions ( mostly those led by former presidents Eduardo Duhalde and Carlos Menem ) migrated to the FPV.

* President who held office for most time continuously: Carlos Menem, for 10 years and 5 months, in two terms ( 1989 – 1999 ).

During the first years of Néstor Kirchner's rule, Adolfo Rodríguez Saá joined Menem and his brother Alberto ( by then, the new governor of San Luis ) to create an alternative political group against Kirchner within the PJ.

Argentina, the other South American guarantor involved in the matter, admitted to the illegal sale of armament by revealing the existence of three secret decrees signed by President Carlos Menem between the years of 1991 and 1995.

Six years later, it returned to power with Carlos Menem, during whose term the Constitution was reformed to allow for presidential reelection.

In recent years, and in spite its strength as the only labour representative in many forums, the CGT has faced growing opposition from other trade unions, such as the CTA, or the left-leaning grassroots organisations of unemployed people known as Piqueteros ( Picketing Men ), groups first in evidence during the Menem years which have since become tenuously allied with the Kirchner administrations.

The 1990s were the years of the Menem administration.

He was returned by voters to Congress in 1991, and named Interior Minister by Menem on March 1, 1993 ; relatives to the victims of the 1994 AMIA bombing later put his role during the crisis into question.

However, amid a massive economic downturn, Alfonsin opted to transfer power to Menem five months early, on July 8.

Menem assumed duties in the midst of a major economic crisis which included hyperinflation and recession.

He continued on the same economic course of Menem, which ultimately led to the 2001 economic crash and de la Rúa's resignation.

The improved economic situation was achieved by a neo-Keynesian expansion of consumption and investment expenditure, in contrast to the neo-liberalism of the Menem Government.

The plant closed as a result of the economic policies of the Carlos Menem government under the watchful eye of the International Monetary Fund.

In April 1991, Menem reverted the country's policies according to ideas of Washington Consensus to what was later to be called economic neoliberalism.

Following the 1989 economic crisis that led to the early handover of power by President Raúl Alfonsín to President-elect Carlos Menem, the UCR Mayor of Rosario Horacio Usandizaga resigned in protest, forcing anticipated municipal elections to be held.