Beyond the Washington Consensus

Latin America stands at a crossroads. Continuing along the present path of deepening indebtedness, never-ending recession, plummeting employment, and household impoverishment is simply unsustainable. It would be a mistake to conclude that the dominant economic policy paradigm in the region is exclusively responsible for this sorry performance. Nonetheless, the verdict is now in on the ability of the market-based economic policies associated with the Washington Consensus to generate positive results: The market-driven model has failed miserably, and alternatives need to be put in place sooner rather than later.

This NACLA Report aims to provide an overview of some of the questions that are being debated vigorously in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to highlight some of the more provocative ideas circulating among progressive analysts of development in the region. We do not aim to achieve consensus, not to mention closure. Indeed, it would be premature to attempt either. Our admittedly more modest objective is simply to situate the present conjuncture in a broader historical context, to signal areas of particularly heated controversy and to suggest some elements of an eventual alternative.

November/December
2003
Volume: 
37
Number: 
3

Taking Note

Teo Ballvé
We sure did, Mr. President. How could we have “misunderestimated” your regime’s ability to drive your country two Worlds back to the Third—not just a Third World country, but a full blown Banana Empire.

Intro

Eric Hershberg
Not for the first time in its arduous history, Latin America stands poised at a crossroads. Continuing along the present path of deepening indebtedness, never-ending recession, plummeting employment and household impoverishment is simply unsustainable.

Updates

Jim Schultz
COCHABAMBA, BOLIVIA—On the night of Friday, October 17, television screens across Bolivia were split into two mesmerizing images of history unfolding. At the bottom of the screen was a Boeing 767, an overnight flight to Miami, slowly taxiing out to the runway. Among its passengers was Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who had just resigned the nation’s presidency.
Teo Ballvé
CANCUN, MEXICO—As the World Trade Organization’s Fifth Ministerial Meeting was kicked-off September 10 in Cancún, Mexico, the battle on the streets began. Demonstrators and police in full riot gear exchanged blows with sticks and batons as large jagged chunks of pavement and rocks were being hurled at the police line.
John Ross
With their rubber boots slapping at the slick cobblestones and faces hooded by mists and masks, they seemed like ghosts from a past that many do not recognize as being very present in contemporary Mexico. They advanced on the center of San Cristóbal de las Casas, the capital of the Mayan highlands of Chiapas, in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1994, the start-up date for that beacon of globalization, the North American Free Trade Agreement—NAFTA.

Report

Fred Rosen
As global poverty deepens, doubts have begun to emerge “from within” regarding the market-driven, neoliberal development model—also known as the Washington Consensus. After 20 years of neoliberal hegemony, many within the international financial institutions (IFIs) have begun talking about the modifications of a “Post-Washington Consensus” or of the need for “second-generation reforms.”
Keith Nurse
The articulation of an alternative framework for development cannot stop with a critique of the neoliberal agenda championed in recent years by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.
Juan Pablo Pérez Sáinz and Katharine Andrade-Eekhoff
It is now commonplace to affirm that globalization has accentuated the importance of local spaces. Contrary to the supposed worldwide trend toward homogenization induced by global markets, the socio-cultural and political peculiarities of specific places are now understood to be crucial to determining how communities cope with the challenges of globalization.
Cecilia López Montaño
During the last decade of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st, Latin America has managed to exemplify virtually every macroeconomic policy mistake imaginable. With few exceptions, policies implemented throughout the region promoted neither economic growth nor social equity.
Mariama Williams
Implicit in the conceptual frameworks underpin- ning economic policymaking of recent years in Latin America and the Caribbean are a complex and largely hidden range of assumptions about what the economy actually is, and about what it is for. Whether the question at hand is how best to calibrate fiscal, monetary, exchange rate or international trade policies, or whether the argument is over the differ- ent sources of comparative or competitive advan- tage, debates about economic policy tend to overlook the degree to which policies, instruments and meth- ods of economic decision-making are linked inextri- cably to the lived experiences of human beings.

Letters

NACLA readers
In the article, “From Allende to Lula” (July/August) it seems that Philip Oxhorn’s reason for including Chávez as part of the “new left” of Latin American leaders is purely to exalt Lula and to divide the “progressive pedigree” into good and bad camps..

Tracking the Economy

The Center for Economic and Policy Research
The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) spring projections for the following year’s growth in Latin America have been too high in 13 of the last 17 years. There is a low probability that overstating growth with this frequency is due to random chance rather than to a systematic bias.

In Brief

Kelly Creedon
On October 9, the Salvadoran legislature approved a controversial anti-gang law that has raised alarm among human rights and civil liberties advocates. The new anti-gang law was narrowly passed by the right-wing coalition led by the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party.

¡YA! Youth Activism

NACLA
Shorty Fatz is a comic strip, a world created by Samuel Rodriguez, Angel Luna and David Madrid. This world exists at the confluence of race, ethnicity, immigration, labor, politics, urban life, youth culture and, more than anything else, good-old-fashioned humor—in other words, their San Jose, California barrio.