This paper contributes to the study of the economic history of argentine crises by analyzing the fiscal sustainability for the period 1865-2002. Fiscal deficits are sustainable if the current market value of debt equals to the discounted sum of expected future surpluses. Following a large literature started by Hamilton and Flavin (1986) sustainability is empirically tested by finding out if revenues and expenditures (including interest payments) are cointegrated along a given period. It is found that Argentina never had “strong” fiscal sustainability. At most, it reached weak sustainability for some sub periods and no sustainability at all for 1950-1989. Interestingly, sustainability gets worse as the economy went from mostly open to relatively close.