Though democracy returned to Argentina three years later, the armed forces continued to exercise vetting power over most policy and in 1963, Martínez de Hoz became one of a series of conservative Argentine Economy Ministers during José María Guido's brief presidency (an interlude marked by squabbles among the military brass and recession).

Seven years later, after union labourers at Acindar's Villa Constitución plant elected a socialist shop steward, Martínez de Hoz retaliated by using his family's long-standing connections with the armed forces to have them brutally repressed.

[6] Anxious to restore business confidence, announced a plan to further open Argentina's markets, believing that the country's national industry was inefficient and uncompetitive internationally.

As a result of the changes instituted by Martínez de Hoz, inflation fell sharply; but, many local retailers and home builders became incapable of coping with the fall in demand and declared bankruptcy.

However, real wages had lost nearly 40% of their purchasing power, and while consumer spending remained weak, the shock might have been worse but for hitherto high savings rates.

Inflation revived again, and Martínez de Hoz responded in June 1977, with deregulation of the financial markets, removing checks on banks and transferring responsibility for any bad loans to the state, which took charge of their debt as needed.

[11] The Central Bank, like many key economic posts in the Martínez de Hoz era, was led by one of a number of Chicago Boys: Adolfo Diz.

To address his fellow conservatives' fear that this might lead to even higher inflation, he introduced a novel take on the currency crawling peg: fixed, progressively smaller devaluations of the official exchange rate between the Argentine peso and the US dollar set by a monthly timetable, popularly known as the Tablita.

Record numbers of Argentines now vacationed abroad, often stocking up on appliances; between the suddenly negative trade deficit and tourists' foreign spending, however, this chalked up a then-record US$4 billion annual loss for the national balance sheet in both 1980 and 1981.

[19] This money soon found itself in risky gambles at home and abroad and when one bank's Ponzi scheme collapsed in March 1980, Martínez de Hoz responded to the possible panic by luring investors with one-year treasury bills, paying 60% in US dollars.

[4] The end of his tenure soon near and increasingly unpopular, in April 1980 Martínez de Hoz had the Central Bank promulgate new regulations governing adjustable loans.

The Central Bank Circular 1050 tied monthly loan interest payments (almost all lending in Argentina is on an adjustable basis) to the value of the US dollar vis-a-vis the peso.

[12] Brokerage houses proliferated as put options against the peso increased sharply and in February 1981, Martínez de Hoz announced the unthinkable: the time had come for a sharp devaluation.

[21] In 2006, a judge declared the pardon unconstitutional and revoked the suspension of the previous judicial process, paving the way to investigate Martínez de Hoz's alleged involvement in the kidnapping and extortion of Federico and Miguel Gutheim (a local textile mill owner and his son) in 1976, as well as the murder of Juan Carlos Casariego (one of his own assistants at the Ministry of Economy).