ABSTRACT
Debt has been critical in allowing vested interests in the United States and other First World countries to gain macroeconomic control of Latin America. During the debt renegotiations of the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) moved swiftly from its position on the periphery of the world’s financial order to its very center. In August 1982, Mexico’s government stunned the financial world by announcing that it could no longer service its foreign debt. The Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) themselves involve what the IMF benignly terms “reforms.” These macroeconomic changes are, indeed, reforms from the First World perspective. Latin American nations have implemented SAPs unevenly; and by the beginning of the twenty-first century, a few countries had not been brought completely to heel. The most visible holdouts have been Ecuador and Venezuela. The financial panics of the mid-1990s did much to stop the momentum of the Clinton administration’s globalization efforts.
