Rogelio Julio Frigerio

One fourth of all foreign direct investment into Argentina between 1912 and 1975 took place in the Frondizi years, and the nation's chronic trade deficits, for their part, vanished by 1963.

Partly the victim of bad timing, these policies did not earn either Frondizi or Frigerio the respect of the most powerful institution in Argentina at the time: the armed forces and in December, Frondizi was forced to remove Frigerio from his post.

One of the policy makers behind this was a relatively unknown defense contractor named Alvaro Alsogaray, whose austerity plan Frondizi was forced to implement, causing a sudden doubling of consumer prices and, consequently, a fall in GDP and widespread protest.

Alsogaray made frequent television appearances publicizing his plan; during the first of these, he declared that the Argentine people "must go through winter."

Rogelio Julio Frigerio (November 2, 1914 – September 13, 2006) was an Argentine economist, journalist and politician.

Rogelio Frigerio was born in Buenos Aires in 1914 to Gerónimo Frigerio, an Italian immigrant, and his wife Carmen Guanziroli.

One of eight brothers, he grew up in the quiet residential neighborhood of Villa del Parque and enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires.

Pursuing higher studies at the university's School of Economics, he helped found Insurrexit, a Marxist student association and, as one of its leaders, he edited the group's newsletter, Claridad.

Graduating in 1935, he soon distanced himself from the Argentine left, however, believing them to harbor an elitist disposition.

Establishing a wholesale distributorship with diversified interests in lumber, textiles, leather and minerals, in 1940 he married Noemí Blanco, with whom he had five children.

A talented businessman, Frigerio nonetheless remained politically active, involving himself in intellectual circles and establishing a newsweekly in 1946, Qué pasó en siete dias ("What Happened in Seven Days").

Frondizi and Frigerio inherited a difficult economic situation: following a 1946-48 boom, GDP had grown by a modest 3% a year in the decade since.

Declining exports and a growing need for costly imported motor vehicles, machinery and fuel, moreover, had caused Argentina to run trade deficits in seven out the past ten years.

Unable to finance these easily, Frondizi's two predecessors, Perón and Pedro Aramburu, resorted to "printing" money to cover the nation's yawning current account deficits, causing prices to rise around sixfold.

Frigerio, whom U.S. interests in Argentina suspected of being a Communist, believed that the only sustainable remedy for this was the encouragement of foreign direct investment into Argentina, particularly in energy and industry — the sectors accounting for most of the country's trade deficits.

Almost upon his appointment, Frigerio drafted the Law of Foreign Investment, promptly signed by the president.

This law gave incentives and tax benefits to both local and foreign corporations willing to develop Argentina's energy and industry sectors and created the Department and Commission of Foreign Investments, which was designed to give foreign investors more legal recourse.

Frigerio's plans were ambitious, calling for greatly expanded public lending for homebuilders and local industry, and public works investment.

Frigerio also promulgated large petroleum exploration and drilling contracts with foreign oil companies.

These gave interested participants a generous share of the profits from such activities, provided these were carried out in conjunction with the Argentine state oil concern, YPF.

Alienated by the magazine's staunch opposition to the new populist Administration of Juan Perón, however, Frigerio left its editorial board shortly before Perón had the magazine shuttered in 1947.

Though he did not seek public office during the Perón era, Frigerio became a highly visible proponent of accelerated industrial growth and social progress, a combination of policies he described as developmentalism.

Frondizi, the centrist Radical Civic Union (UCR)'s 1951 vice presidential nominee, soon developed a close friendship with Frigerio.

Inspired by recent efforts in that direction such as Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas' Estado Novo and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Frigerio's concern that Perón's similar policies might be reversed following the populist leader's violent 1955 overthrow led him to re-open his former newsmagazine in 1956, naming it simply Qué.

Qué soon attracted prestigious contributors from Argentine intellectual life such as Arturo Jauretche, Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, Jorge Sabato and Arturo Frondizi.

Frigerio, in 1956, secretly arranged a meeting with Perón and his closest adviser at the time, John William Cooke, an erstwhile Communist who, imprisoned for his prominence in the Perón government, had recently escaped his remote Patagonia prison cell.

Exiled in Venezuela and subjected to numerous assassination attempts ordered by the new regime in Argentina, Perón continued to exert considerable political influence in his homeland; as Argentine voters geared for the 1958 elections, the exiled leader's Justicialist Party was barred from fielding even local candidates (the mere mention of Perón's name was illegal).

Following the secret meeting in Caracas, however, Perón endorsed Arturo Frondizi, instructing his supporters to vote for their former opponent and forego casting blank ballots, as a number of Peronists were advocating.

Failing to secure the UCR nomination, Frondizi ran on a splinter ticket, whose party he named the Intransigent Radical Civic Union (UCRI).

Enjoying Perón's support, Frondizi's UCRI handily defeated the mainstream UCR candidate, Ricardo Balbín, by about 1.5 million votes out of 9 million cast.

Arturo Frondizi was inaugurated President of Argentina on May 1, 1958, and designated Frigerio Secretary of Socio-Economic Affairs, a secondary post in the critical Economics Ministry the new president was forced to offer Frigerio due to steadfast opposition from the Argentine military and the U.S. Embassy, both of whom saw Frigerio as a veiled Marxist because of his activities as a young man.

President Frondizi, even so, gave Frigerio informal say over a broad swath of economic policy.

As a consequence of investments initiated during the next four years, the profile of a number of sectors in the Argentine economy were revolutionized by the early 1960s:

The availability of consumer durables like washing machines, refrigerators, ovens, appliances and television sets all also increased sharply, as local and foreign investors soon broke ground on factories making all these goods and many more.

Relegated to informal adviser to the president, Frigerio opposed Alsogaray's belt-tightening measures and increasingly unpopular, Alsogaray's influence quickly waned; in early 1961, he resigned.

Again influencing economic policy from his informal role, Frigerio's close working relationship with the president continued until, on March 28, 1962, Arturo Frondizi was deposed while attending a Western Hemisphere summit in Montevideo, Uruguay in hopes of mediating the conflict between the U.S. and Fidel Castro's Cuba.

Arrested upon his return to the Casa Rosada the following morning, Frondizi defiantly pronounced that he would "not resign, nor commit suicide, or leave the country," the president was imprisoned and Frigerio, exiled in Uruguay.

Returning to Buenos Aires in 1963, Frigerio was reunited with Arturo Frondizi, now free.

Believing that their past economic accomplishments had made a return to politics possible, the two friends founded the Integration and Development Movement (MID).

MID was barred from the 1963 elections due to military opposition and serious differences over strategy resulted in an open enmity between UCRI candidate Oscar Alende (the progressive former governor of the Province of Buenos Aires and Frondizi ally) and the MID, which opted to encourage its supporters to cast blank ballots.