Argentina's new-found stability lures local firms.

Argentina is attracting wary but interested glances from Washington businesses, as the Latin American country controls its runaway inflation of recent years.

Representatives of about a dozen Washington firms met recently with Ambassador Luis Riccheri, director of the just-founded Argentine Republic Promotion Center in Los Angeles, who was on his first visit to Seattle.

"Argentina is getting out of a nightmare. Five decades of state-owned companies, a nightmare of protectionism, inefficiencies and lack of political freedom," Riccheri said, referring to the Peron era and the military dictatorship that followed it. "That nightmare is fortunately over. Now it's …