ABSTRACT
If one looks back on the early 1990s, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, with socialism disappearing, Cuba disintegrating, and China fully engaged in a dynamic model of authoritarian state capitalism, the left today in Latin America is in surprisingly good shape. At the time, not only was the paradigm of a progressive road to development in the region being destroyed by events elsewhere in the world, but its opposite-the so-called neo-liberal, Washington Consensus, freemarket option-seemed to be the only game in town. It was popular, successful, and omnipresent: from Menem in Argentina to Salinas de Gortari in Mexico, from the Chilean Concertación to Cardoso’s center-right coalition in Brazil, from Peru’s Fujimori to the hailed “technopols” from the Economics Departments of U.S. universities, the single path seemed to be the right path. Conversely, anything that smacked of economic statism, social redistribution, subsidies, and anti-globalization movements was perceived as anachronistic and mistaken, in good faith or with a hidden agenda.
