ABSTRACT
The Great Depression of the 1930s was a worldwide capitalist depression, and it hit Latin America hard but unevenly. Although an unstable situation, the balance of forces within civil society enabled Latin American governments to function with considerable autonomy, a new political reality illustrated most starkly in Brazil. By the early 1950s, then, the confluence of fiscal and balance-of-payments crises signaled the end of the populist strategy; the political logic of populism could not be supported by the economic logic of Modern Times. The import-substituting industrialization policy recipe was consistent with then-fashionable North American and World Bank thinking about the promotion of industrial development as well as consonant with Modern Times transnational corporation interests. The last was crucial in Brazil, because in the early 1960s, Brazil's per-capita income was less than half that in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Venezuela and therefore necessitated an extremely skewed distribution of income to expand domestic markets for modern consumer goods.
