Democratic retreat in Argentina

Abstract

The Argentine Republic is experiencing a remarkable retreat of democracy. The extension and complexity of this retreat is difficult to understand if using the theories of democracy that, with the collapse of the military dictatorships, have become the dominant analytical frameworks for left and progressive forces in the country and in Latin America.Contemporary democratization, understood as a social process of expansion of the forces of public appropriation, is comprised of three critical vectors: a techno-political vector, a techno-economic vector, and a techno-communicational vector. Each of them consists of a handful of dimensions. Here I would like to simply describe the key events that have been precipitating the structural retreat of democracy in Argentina in 2018. These events are associated with the political repressive dimension of the abovementioned political vector and with one of the paramount dimensions of the techno-economic vector for a peripheral country: the degree of autonomy of the state to define its macro economic policy.