I am not very knowledgeable about Argentina but as a Venezuelan that's currently researching my country's history in depth, in particular economic history, I may be able to answer about it.
To understand Venezuela, you must understand its oil industry. By the turn of the 20th century, Venezuela was politically unstable and heavily indebted. A civil war and skirmishes with local caudillos made the country a hot mess to rule over, and political and economical growth was going slowly.
Enter Juan Vicente Gomez. Second-in-command for President Cipriano Castro, he seized power from him in 1908 as the latter went abroad for surgery. And until his death in 1935, he oversaw the change from a crop-based economy to an oil-exporting one, and it would remain as such till today. He was the first one to direct the oil revenues to modernization and infrastructure development, while taking a large cut for himself and his cronies. The concession-based model for mining and oil extraction that would last until the 1970s, along with minuscule taxation, allowed the foreign companies to take abroad most of the profits from the oil.
Although the Natives and Spaniards knew about the presence of oil beneath the surface thanks to oil seeps, industrial drilling did not take place until the 1910s, due to an increased demand from industrialization and the advent of the internal combustion engine. And in 1922, the oil well Barroso II blew out, spewing a hundred thousand barrels of oil per day for nine days into the air, which was a wonderful PR move by the oil to announce its bountiful presence, and a beacon for foreign companies (i.e. Shell, Esso, British Petroleum) to start large-scale drilling and, soon, refining. In less than a decade, Venezuela would become the third largest oil producer, and largest exporter, in the world.
As mentioned before, the State did not really partake on this bonanza, making most of its income by selling concessions to drill. Political pressures towards democracy and a fair share of the revenues had to wait until Gomez's death in 1935. The country began a slow transition towards democracy and in 1943, it was codified into Law that the State would receive half of the profits from the oil industry. An even bigger share meant larger projects, and with the advent of the first truly democratic government of Romulo Gallegos in 1948, the country was already planning or working on massive public projects: Caracas' University City, housing and government offices, industrial development, bridges...
Around this time, a military government by Marcos Perez Jimenez took hold, ruling between 1952-1958. Oil revenue was essentially unchanged, but modernization and development became a matter of prestige and national security. Also around this time, there was a serious discussion on what to do with the oil revenue. Ultimately the "Sowing the Oil" concept, developed by Arturo Uslar Pietri, dominated. That means that the best way to invest the oil revenue was to invest in the people and the country; via the aforementioned massive public projects but also funding public education, healthcare, and culture, as well as working to export refined goods and not crude oil, and invest on other industries (most notably steel).
By 1961, with democracy properly restored, the country was prosperous. A few years before, the Venezuelan Bolivar was the highest valued currency in the world. ^^1 A welfare state was in place, ensuring the oil revenues were distributed among the people. Politically, a two-party system took hold, which did not allow for much change. And collusion between the parties, as well as the ridiculous amount of state revenue, allowed corruption and inefficiency to flourish. But as long as the oil kept flowing, this could be maintained, and the people were happy.
In 1976, oil was fully nationalized, and PDVSA, the State's oil company, began operations. Venezuela was known at this time as the "Saudi Venezuela", with a high quality of life and an enviable position in Latin America. But shortly thereafter, in the 1980s oil glut, coupled with mismanagement, inefficiency, and corruption, as well as a political desire to keep the welfare state in place, led to bad fiscal and economic policies such as devaluing and fixing an exchange price for the Bolivar and ballooning public debt. The system was unsustainable, and the situation worsened until the nation required a bailout from the IMF. This proved wildly unpopular, and led to massive protests, two coup attempts and an impeachment and, ultimately, inflation and worsening economic conditions that led to the rise of Hugo Chavez in 1998.
This basically covers 20th century Venezuela. I highly recommend watching the three-part El Reventon documentary about the Venezuelan oil history, if you can find it in English. For a more general Latin American woes, including Argentina, Open Veins of Latin America is great for history, but... iffy on economic theory. For a more economic view, Guide for the Perfect Latin American Idiot is a direct counter for the economic theory on that book, and I believe the two ought to be read together.
The decline of both economies should be explained by a convention of economic, political and social factors. In history and economic history this process has been explained in general terms for this economies and also some other Latin American countries (Uruguay, Brazil).
The economic factors that can explain the decline are mainly the dependance of this economies on commodities. One thing that commodities have in common (meat for Argentina and oil for Venezuela) is that their prices fluctuate a a lot, which makes you really dependent on the international price of you exports. According to the Prebisch-Singer theory, this dependence will lead to deterioration on the terms of trade (on the long run what they produce will have a lower relative price to what they import), which leads to stagnation on the growth rate. Furthermore, commodities have (though in my opinion nowadays this is really debatable) low added technology, so also very low added value. Added to this structural problem, in many cases very poor economic policies were applied -although in my opinion this is not the main factor.
From the political and institutional view, most Latin American countries had unstable institutions and political systems which certainly didn't help. In most cases private property didn't have the security it had in rich countries. Add to this some North American intervention in the late '60s and '70s and you have the worst institutional framework imaginable. One of the countries that had stronger political institutions was Uruguay.
From the social view, it should be noted that Latin American societies were (and still are) really inequitable in their distribution. Hand in hand with this, most countries didn't have the human resources that rich countries had. Also, the educated people many times migrated -tendency that was even more notorious in the dictatorial period. And now, to answer your question. With all this structural factors, in the '40s and even more in the '50s, this economies had from one hand really good international prices for their exports (WWII and Korean war really helped); and from the other, they were applying a development agenda influenced by the ECLAD. In the late '50s the international context wasn't so favorable as it had been. Governments in this periods had large deficits which weren't much of a concern when prices were good, but when prices went down, strong fiscal adjustments measures were put in place. From the development model, it varied from country to country, but in general terms a really faulty application of the theory was the norm. Things like excessive protectionism, artificial exchange rates and corruption were very common.
The decline started in most countries by the late '50s and continued at least up to the 2000s. The ISI model was abandoned throughout the '70s, and in the '90s economies had shifted towards hard neoliberalism (which is the exact opposite of the ISI model).
To sum up, the divergence in GDP per capita between Western Europe and North American was mainly due to what each of them export and how they produce it (added some institutional, political and social factors). While in the developed countries they produced high tech goods (then cars now IT, tu put it grossly) which have more technology and human resources added (therefore much more productivity per worker); Latin American countries produced commodities and some industrial goods thanks to protectionism, they only exported commodities (on which the latter depended on the former being exported at good prices). Economies that export commodities are less prone to have technological advancements and added human resources, which are the main factors that lead to more productivity.
I hope this explanation can at least put a light into what happened. You should know that in economic history (like in all social sciences) the points I've just made are really debatable, and even I do not agree with all of them, I used this theory (the ECLAD theory of dependence in its contemporary form) because I find it to be the one that can explain it better in a complexity that is appropriate for a Reddit post ha ha. What I really can't stand is when such complex process is reduced to bad policy and corruption. In my opinion -although corruption and bad policy were not helpful and can explain some part of the process- that's an extremely simplistic view. The decline should be explained mainly by the structural problems this economies had (and, though very different from that period, still have).
Sources: L. Bértola, J.A. Ocampo, "The Economic Development of Latin America since Independence", Oxford University Press, 2012.
Bértola & Rodríguez-Weber (2015), “Latin American Economic History: looking backwards for the future” (chapter from Boldizzoni & Hudson)
Coatsworth (2005), “Structures, Endowments, and Institutions in the Economic History of Latin America”
Thorp (1992), “A reappraisal of the origins of import-substitution industrialization”
Edwards (2009), “Protectionism and Latin America’s historical economic decline”
In this link you can find a lot of papers form different angles to this problem: https://pseudoerasmus.com/papers/#LA
Follow up: common perception is that nazis fled to argentina after ww2. Was there any noticable influx of german capital and culture on the argentiniam economy?
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