ABSTRACT
The 1990s for Latin America had been a decade characterized by generally middle-of-the-road neocapitalist governments relying heavily upon participating in globalization by opening up their economies and privatizing investment-starved state enterprises in keeping with the so-called Washington Consensus among most of the region's leaders. The 2000s opened with Brazil entering year two of Fernando Henrique Cardoso's second administration. The significance of recent developments in Mexico should not in any way be underestimated. The once stodgy and Catholic Church-linked National Action Party had been reinvigorated during the 1980s as ranchers and industrialists alienated from the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party by the 1982 bank nationalizations entered its right-of-center opposition. The new century started disastrously for Argentina. The troubled country of Colombia entered the new century mired in the Andres Pastrana administration's futile efforts at negotiating peace with the entrenched insurgents, a policy belatedly abandoned in February 2002.
