Introduction: Perspectives and Arguments

In the many intense debates over development in Latin America in recent decades, the question rarely arose, as it had in previous decades, as to what kind of capitalism existed or whether capitalism in Latin America was somehow different. If anything, the homogenizing Washington Consensus of the 1990 sidelined such queries with expectations that market reforms would soon make the economies of Latin America resemble liberal economies elsewhere. Market reforms and globalization have transformed many aspects of capitalism in Latin America, but areas of convergence are often, as elsewhere, less interesting and less consequential for development than are the areas of continued divergence. So, it is worthwhile to raise again the question of what sort of capitalism exists in Latin America.

Most attempts to characterize the political economies of Latin America as somehow distinctive can be roughly classified as internationalist or statist. The former was famously staked out in various dependency arguments of the 1960s and 1970s that claimed that international economic ties created a stunted form of capitalism with limited possibilities for autonomous development. The internationalist perspective later resurfaced in several guises including global production networks (Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon 2005), natural resource curses (Karl 1997), and other macro perspectives on debt and international capital flows (Maxfield 1997). Internationalist perspectives are indispensable in some places (such as oil exporters or export zones) or some periods (such as the debt crisis of the 1980s), but these are only partial views because they miss most of the domestic political economies of the rest of the region in more normal times.