ABSTRACT
The core-periphery model has long distorted the study of multilateral cooperation. The 1970s–1980s marked a turning point in the transnational experimentation of economic policies, converting the Latin American sub-continent into a social laboratory. Most studies on the topic focused on the IMF and the World Bank’s methods, hegemonic business practices, and the international circulation of economic ideas. Few have explored the agency of the countries involved in such unbalanced situations and the central role they have played in the global financial revolution that has transformed markets over these two decades. This chapter aims at providing a renewed understanding of multilateral financial cooperation and the role of economists in the ideological convergence that accompanied capital flows. We explore how negotiations were conducted in a context of financial dependency and transpose the theoretical proposal of Bourdieu and Boltanski on the production of the dominant ideology to the Mexican default on external debt in 1982. We analyze the crisis as a proxy for revealing the structural mechanisms of Mexican economic policies. It allows us to examine the global circulation of economic ideas at the heart of the negotiations between the Mexican government, the IMF, the U.S. Treasury, and creditor banks. The failures of the structural adjustment programs challenged technocratic theories applied to the Mexican case and revealed the function of economic policy rhetoric in supporting the circulation of capital flows in the changing world of the 1980s.
