Introduction

Since the beginning of the century, the tendency in Latin America has been that of extraordinary ideological turns followed by the reversing of the direction of public policies. Considering the degree of the metamorphosis going on in the states of the region, electoral victories of formulas that proclaimed (in a more or less clear way) their distance from the neoliberal ideology, have taken place in a fairly short period of time with renewed state intervention in the economy.

This turn has given new energy to the discussion of the new public agenda and the key components of the emerging development project being constructed by political scientists and economists. In other words, a new space for politics was opened up. The 1980s was a period of relative freedom for the governments of peripheral countries, given the deep fiscal crisis inherited after the debt crisis and the neoliberal ideological policies. The combination of the renowned Washington Consensus and fiscal constraints were key for governments to carry out a handbook of structural reforms forced, mostly, by short-term emergencies. In recent years, the process of reverting the countries' conditions to carry out their autonomous development pathways has been accelerated.