Poverty in transition: The rediscovery of poverty and state treatment of the popular sectors in Argentina in the eighties

Abstract

This paper describes and analyzes three processes. These three processes – initiated during the 1980s in the context of the return to democracy in Argentina – would have a strong influence in the way the State will treated the “social question” once it was redefined as a “fight against the poverty”. These initiatives were born within different state agencies and came together in an embryonic transformation with a strong modernizing hallmark of the conception of social policies. First, the creation of the Programa Alimentario Nacional (PAN), that mobilized new issues linked to poverty in Argentina; second, the enterprise of the statistical definition and measurement of poverty and “poor people” by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC); finally, the conformation of a group of analysis of the social policies in a state agency. The paper shows how, throughout these processes, expert became key actors. It also shows how, in the combination of technical speeches, social multiposition, and political commitments, they managed to move forward the ways of state intervention on the popular sectores in a technified sense.