What the South Can Tell the North

As the crisis first loomed and then broke out, the US presidential campaign raised an important question for that country and for the world: in view of the multiple problems hovering over it, was American society willing to accept a cast generational change and a shift in course regarding state policies? The election was between fear and hope. Seen from the Latin American experience, the election gave the crisis in the North another face—an opportunity for action that would be less conditioned by the restraints of the recent past and the outgoing administration.

The great changes in social, economic and political direction in Latin America in the last decades have been propelled less by a plan, a will agreed by consensus, or a coherent ideology than by the harsh necessity and the strong and recurrent crises that have shaken the continent. Those crises, and their respective exits, have had both good and adverse effects. A sign of discontinuity thus characterizes recent Latin American history. Therefore, there has been neither sustained economic development nor systematic social progress.

To simplify, I will say that the last decades' great Latin American crises have been two: the first one was the hyperinflationary crisis of the eighties, which marked the exhaustion of a substitutive industrial development style, mainly geared to domestic markets.