Myths and Realities: Latin America's Free Markets

Abstract

The decade of the 1980s in Latin America was a period of economic and social regression, commonly known as the lost decade. The massive and sustained evidence of the failure of capitalism in Latin America ill accords with the triumphalist mood that pervades the advanced capitalist countries in the wake of victory in the Cold War. To cover up the disaster, the leading ideologists of the banks and multinational corporations have adopted a threefold strategy: (1) shifting responsibility for the Latin American debacle from the free market policies of the present to the activist policies of past decades; (2) proclaiming the imminent end of the lost decade as governments turn to principles of unregulated capitalism; (3) manufacturing evidence of massive popular support for these principles.

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