La crisi del debito latinoamericana. Il governo di Raúl Alfonsín durante le negoziazioni del debito estero argentino (1983-1989)/ La crisis latinoamericana de la deuda. El gobierno de Raúl Alfonsín durante las negociaciones de la deuda externa argentina (1983-1989)

This thesis aims to analyze the domestic and international constraints which shaped the strategy adopted by the administration of Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín (1983-1989) in the renegotiation of Argentina’s external debt. The high exposure of major banks in industrialized countries, the disproportionate burden of debt servicing—resulting in a significant transfer of resources from debtor economies to creditor countries—and the regime change inaugurated by Alfonsín’s election following the years of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional constitute the structural backdrop from which the central research question of this study emerges: why did Argentina decide to recognize the approximately €45 billion debt inherited from the military regime? Why did the Alfonsín administration not default? To address such question, this study adopts a historical-explanatory approach grounded in a qualitative and interpretative methodology. The research relies on the documentary analysis of a broad corpus of sources, including Argentine institutional archives, documentation from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), materials drawn from the private archives of key informants, interviews conducted with them, and the scholarly literature consulted during fieldwork and research stays. The mentioned activities were carried out between Naples, Rosario, Buenos Aires, and Washington within the framework of the doctoral programs of the University of Naples L'Orientale and the National University of Rosario. Building on the theoretical contributions of Giovanni Arrighi regarding the succession of hegemonies associated with systemic cycles of accumulation, the presented work situates the Latin American debt crisis, Argentina’s rapid indebtedness, and the subsequent negotiations within the broader structural transformations of the international political economy that generated them. The top-down reading proposed by the Italian scholar —according to which the management of the crisis represented a moment of reorganization of U.S. hegemony— is here complemented by an analytical perspective attentive to the tensions inherent in Argentina’s democratic transition. Considering the limited number of studies which systematically apply Arrighi’s interpretation of the debt crisis to the Latin American case, the presented historical reconstruction of the Argentinian case offers a suitable perspective to illuminate the historical scope of the relationship between financial markets and democracy during the era of structural adjustment programs promoted by the IMF, from which the Washington Consensus would later emerge, reshaping the economic and political trajectory of the region.