A Market Solution For The Americas?
UnpublishedFebruary
1993
Volume:
26
Number:
4
Taking Note
Fred Rosen
The most dramatic in Venezuela's municipal and gubernatorial elections held this past December—just nine days after the second military coup attempt of the year—were made by two small parties on the Left, Movement To Socialism (MAS) and the grassroots workers party, Causa R. In the midst of neoliberal reforms that have brought sharp economic growth alongside declining standards of living, the governing Democratic Action (AD) party of President Carlos Andrés Pérez suffered one of the worst electoral defeats in its long history.
Updates
Egbert Higinio & Ian Munt
“Eco-terrorism at Hachet Cay” snapped a headline last year in the popular Belizean weekly Amandala. The newspaper was taking umbrage at a U.S. resort owner who had allegedly blown up part of the coral reef to make his resort more accessible to visiting boats.
James Green & Enrique Asis
When Dr. Francisco Estrada Valle, a co-founder of AVES, one of Mexico's first AIDS-education programs, failed to show up last July 12 at a school seminar on AIDS prevention he was scheduled to lead, his friends became worried and reported him missing to the police. Early the next morning Estrada's body was found in an apartment in southern Mexico City with the bodies of two other gay men—Rene de la Torre Gonzalez, a physician, and Javier Rivero Melendez, a schoolteacher. The three had been gagged, stabbed and strangled.
Midge Quandt
When negotiations between the Nicaraguan government and striking sugar workers stalled last March, strikers camped out in a park opposite the President's office in central Managua. They parked a gasoline truck and a trailer filled with 3,500 sacks of sugar across a main thoroughfare, blocking traffic.
Report
NACLA
“The word of the day in Latin America" says Mario Vargas Llosa—the great novelist and ftee-marketeer, "is liberal." Liberal, to Vargas Llosa's evident delight, has replaced social as the region's most fashionable political adjective. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the word refers back to the individualism of Adam Smith and John Locke, and has an unmistakable connection with free markets.
Article
Ricardo Grinspun & Maxwell Cameron
MEXICO HAS THE POTENTIAL FOR A MORE equitable and beneficial type of economic growth. Economist Ren6 Villareal, for example, has recently argued that "the most viable Mexican industrialization strategy in- volves (1) an expansion of manufacturing exports and (2) endogenous industrial growth centering on basic goods and inputs.
Cathy Schneider
The Chilean economic miracle has received a great deal of press over the past decade. Governments as far away as Prague and Moscow have sought the advice of Chilean economists on matters ranging from privatization and economic restructuring, to unemployment and poverty.
Readers are invited to address letters to The Editors, Report on the Americas, 475 Riverside Drive, Suite 454, New York, NY 10115. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.
Marc Edelman & Rodolfo Monge Oviedo
From 1980 to 1982, Costa Rica was battered by its worst economic crisis since the great depression. Inflation soared, and the normally complacent citizens of Central America's most prosperous nation were shocked by unprecedented scenes of children singing for coins on buses, beggars going door to door, and homeless families huddled under bridges.
El desafio neoliberal: el fin del tercer- mundismo en Amirica Latina edited by Barry B. Levine, Grupo Editorial Norma (Distributed by Carvajal Inter- national, Coral Gables, FL), 1992, 518 pp.
Egbert Higinio & Ian Munt
Hosted in a new luxury hotel on the ecologically fragile outskirts of Belize City-the construction of which ne- cessitated stripping the protective man- grove cover-two recent major inter- national conferences on eco-tourism highlighted the conflict between envi- ronmentally conscious activists and entrepreneurs who have seized upon eco-tourism as a convenient market- ing tool. The keynote speaker at the First Caribbean Eco-tourism Conference in 1991, Voit Gilmore from the American Society of Travel Agents, promised "millions of Americans just waiting to come.
Ricardo Grinspun & Maxwell Cameron
Until its recent embrace of free trade and market-oriented reform, Mexico was a paragon of nationalism and inward-oriented development. The Mexican state created a framework for capitalist development in which the demands of the working class were coopted and controlled, national capital was protected and encouraged, and foreign capital was extensively regulated.
Gernán Sánchez Otero
Despite dome of their clamis, proponents of neoliberalism in Latin America have no real interest in reproducing the free market of the nineteenth century.
James Green & Enrique Asis
When Juan Ortega (a pseudonym) went to his doctor three years ago for an HIV test, he was sure that he would not have the virus. He had been in a three- year relationship.
David Ruccio
The Latin American Landscape is littered with failed economic policies—or so it would seem.
Ricardo Grinspun & Maxwell Cameron
THE DE LA MADRID-SALINAS REFORMS CAN BE seen as a response to problems created by the Mexican model of import-substitution industrialization (ISI) that governed policymaking during the post-war period. Under President Luis Echeverria (1970-1976) these problems showed up as growing public deficits, high inflation, in- equality in the distribution of income and balance-of- payments disequilibria.