This paper pursues the historical perspective which I have employed in a recently completed book. In that book I study the attempt, begun in 1966, to implant and consolidate in Argentina what I have called a "bureaucratic-authoritarian" (BA) State. 1 I have compared the modalities of its alliance with the large bourgeoisie and with international capital, its social impact and, finally, its collapse, with Brazil since 1964 and Chile after 1973. Rather than pointing out similarities between the Argentine case and the others, I shall stress here some differences, for these offer a basis for understanding why, in recent decades, attempts to establish any type of political domination have failed in Argentina. 2 The following pages contain no analysis of specific conjunctures. This work places itself at the level of the long term tendencies which link the said con-" A first version of this paper was prepared in Spanish for the Conference on "The State and Economic Development in Latin America", Cambridge University, December 12-16, 1976. 11 Since then the increasingly capital-intensive modalities of the production of wool, cereals and beef in the world market implied that agrarian productivity in Uruguay and Argentina with respect to other exporters rapidly fell behind; cf. Carlos Diaz Alejandro. 12 Lucio Geller (1975). 13 The exception to this generalization is Brazil's Sao Paulo industrialization, based