When democracy was restored, he decided to take his family back to Argentina, and did so in 1984. Instead of integrating himself back into the Argentine academia, however, he started working almost full time as an international consultant with the United Nations, chiefly with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). He currently holds a part-time position as Professor in the Universidad del Salvador, with frequent leaves to work abroad. His main work involves international short-term contracts with UN agencies, and also some local consultancies with the Argentine government. Regarding his work as a consultant, he says,

“Working mainly as a free-lance consultant may have its drawbacks, especially the lack of job security and some dry spells here and there, but on the whole I enjoy the freedom of not being part of a bureaucracy. Traveling around is also a plus, though a bit tiring at times.”

During the 1980's and early 1990's, his work took him to almost all Latin American countries Since the late 1990's, he has started working in other parts of the world, including several African countries, Syria and a very interesting string in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Most of his research has come from this varied experience.

Hector's first experience with SPSS was in the 1970's, in its first incarnation as mainframe software. He'd had some training in programming, but mostly used SPSS through the intermediary of a programmer. Nevertheless, he had to learn what the program did, and how to take advantage of its capabilities. In 1978, he wrote a handout for his students, "SPSS: A guide for the lay user," which was intended to advise students on how to instruct programmers in order to obtain their research results. He used that text also for training local staff in a UN project in Bolivia dealing with employment and migration surveys, on which he worked in 1980 and 1981.

During the 1980's and 1990's, Hector had to deal with existing surveys and census data in the various countries where he was charged with analyzing rural poverty, land tenure, rural development, employment or agrarian structure. The techniques of analysis were relatively simple (tabulations, descriptive statistics, linear regression, clustering, and some analysis of variance). One of his main concerns was data manipulation and file management, since often his data came in the most difficult shapes requiring heavy restructuring, and he learned some sophisticated tricks in this regard in order to achieve what he wanted. According to Hector:

International consultants are ordinarily given very little time to achieve results, usually one or two weeks in a country plus one or two weeks at headquarters for writing reports and presentations, and thus one has to become efficient enough to acquire and ‘digest’ massive amounts of data in a very short time.