Capital: Buenos Aires
Area: 2 780 400 km²
Population:37 981 000
Currency: 1 US$ = 2.85 Pesos A.
GDP: 55 / 11 320 $
HDI:  34 / 0.849
CPI  :  - / -

2002 data

Juan Díaz de Solís landed on the shores of the Río de la Plata in 1516 and Ferdinand Magellan entered the estuary in 1520. In 1536, Sebastian Cabot and his rival Diego Garcia both ascended the Paraná and Paraguay rivers and founded a settlement that was abandoned two years later.

Pedro de Mendoza founded the first settlement of Buenos Aires in 1536, but native attacks forced its abandonment and Asunción became the leading city of the Río de la Plata region until Buenos Aires was re founded in 1580 by Juan de Garay.

The oldest towns in Argentina: Santiago del Estero, Tucumán, , Córdoba, Salta, La Rioja and San Salvador de Jujuy were founded by Spaniards following the old Inca road from Peru. San Juan, Mendoza, and San Luis were founded by others crossing the Andes from Chile, also a part of the viceroyalty of Lima that had been established in 1570.

In 1776 the Spanish government made Buenos Aires a free port and the capital of a new viceroyalty that included present Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and part of Bolivia.

In 1806 a British naval squadron took Buenos Aires with little resistance from the Spanish colonial forces. A few months later a volunteer militia of local people forced the invaders out and resisted recapture by British reinforcements. When Spain fell to Napoleon in 1810, prominent Criollos in Buenos Aires backed by this militia forced the last Spanish viceroy to surrender power to a local junta. Spain attempted to retake the Viceroyalty but was soundly defeated by the Buenos Aires forces who then undertook to spread the cause of independence.

In July 1816, a congress in Tucumán proclaimed the independence of the United Provinces of the Río de La Plata with Uruguay and Paraguay going their own ways. Armed conflict soon broke out between those who favoured a centralised government dominated by Buenos Aires and regional federalists backed by autocratic caudillos with gaucho troops. This internal conflict persisted though the war with Brazil (1827), that led to the independence of Uruguay and the war of the Triple Alliance (1865), that crushed Paraguay, until the final triumph of federalism in 1880 under General Roca (who had definitely subjugated the indigenous peoples of the south in 1879). Buenos Aires became a federal district with the city of La Plata becoming the capital of the province of Buenos Aires.

By the beginning of the 20th century Argentina had become one of the richest countries in the world, and its population had been boosted by the arrival of millions of Europeans. Civilian rule was generally peaceful and stable until a military coup in 1930. Another coup occurred in 1943, after which Juan Domingo Perón, a key figure in the coup, emerged as the country's leader. He encouraged the growth of labour unions and raised wages, and in 1946 he was elected president. Perón and his wife Eva, who was a champion of social welfare programmes, were immensely popular among the masses, but as the economy deteriorated Perón became increasingly autocratic. His efforts to secularise the nation brought him into conflict with the Roman Catholic Church and alienated his military officers; he was overthrown in 1955.

After a series of military governments , Perón was allowed to return to power in 1973, but he died in 1974, leaving his second wife Isabel to head the national government. After Marxist revolutionaries, the Montoneros, engaged in violence in 1976, the military took power and embarked upon its own "dirty war" against those it considered subversive. Thousands were murdered or disappeared.

In 1981 General Videla, who had ousted Isabel Perón, was succeeded as president by General Roberto Viola. Before the year ended Viola had been replaced by General Leopoldo Galtieri. In 1982, faced with the economic crisis Galtieri ordered Argentine forces to invade the Falkland Islands occupied by the United Kingdom since 1833. To the junta´s surprise, the United Kingdom dispatched a military task force to the South Atlantic, and within three months the Argentine forces had been defeated and the islands recaptured. Humiliated, Galtieri resigned, and in 1983 democratic elections brought Raúl Alfonsín of the Radical Civic Union party to power.

The economy deteriorated further, and Alfonsin was replaced by Carlos Menem in May 1989. Menem instituted major economic changes, privatising nationalised industries, opening the economy to foreign investment and pegging the peso one-to-one to the US dollar in 1991. Menem was re-elected in 1995 but his radical neo-liberalism and unabashed corruption led to to rising unemployment and a prolonged recession.

He was replaced in 1999 by Fernando de la Rua who had promised to eliminate corruption but who had to resign in 2001 because of massive demonstrations against the government's inability to solve the country's economic and social crisis.

The Legislative Assembly then selected Mr. Eduardo Duhalde who promptly ended ten years of parity and devalued the peso by more than 50%. The economy nonetheless remained in disarray with a huge public debt and Nestor Kirchner won the new presidential elections in May 2003. See "Rich Bankrupt Argentina" for more details on the debt problem.