ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the processes refer basically to three principal questions or dimensions: national independence, development, and democratization. Any reflection on socialism and its prospects in Latin America consider the impact of the disappearance of the “East” as even a hypothetical alternative to the international capitalist system. The crisis framed the transfer of income from the poorest groups to the most wealthy and from Latin America to the developed world. The refusal of Latin American governments in the mid-1980s to collectively negotiate the foreign debt meant abandoning their only instrument of pressure over the capitalist financial system and accepting as a guide for economic policy the good-debtor manual written by the creditors. Stable access to food, employment, health, and education apparently remains an unattainable goal for one-half to two-thirds of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean. The political panorama in Latin America emphasizes the necessity of a popular strategy of institutional struggle and of struggle for the institutions.
