Leila V. Girschweiler

2026 London

Abstract: Business history has a long tradition of studying single companies. In my research exploring how Swiss companies navigated the context of military dictatorship in Argentina and Brazil, I consider five parent companies and an even higher number of subsidiaries. This paper presents research on the ways in which these companies were affected by attacks from guerillas and labor movements, and how they responded to such events in the two host countries. For Argentina this implies taking into account the period leading up to the 1976 coup d’état, and for Brazil a framing that also includes the broader context of a “communist threat”. The presentation will put a particular focus on the ways in which the different subsidiaries related to each other. On the one hand, empirically, considering concerted efforts and connections between the companies e.g. through board interlocks or exchange of information. On the other hand, methodologically, when in the research process different corporate archives complemented each other in the reconstruction of events. The study builds on the rich literature that has considered the roles of economic and business actors in the military dictatorships of the Latin American Southern Cone (e.g. Verbitsky & Bohoslavsky 2015, Basualdo et al. 2021, Altamura 2021) and wishes to bring new insights on the relationships between parent companies and subsidiaries to the field.