ABSTRACT
Conventional wisdom maintains that regional solutions are outgrown after a certain point, when a nation such as Brazil enters the international market and differentiates the sources of trade and finance. The long term consequences of the debt crisis are unclear, but the short-term result is that Brazil, and the other Latin Americans nations, are again reliant on Washington and New York. The North American system was born out of military and economic necessity on the eve of World War II, but since the late 19th century there was a long history of intensifying economic relations. Within the emergent South American system, the Plata Basin growth pole running from Sa Paulo to Buenos Aires has great potential: energy, transportation, and consumer markets with the strongest purchasing power in South America, Venezuela excepted. Mexico, for all its nationalist ideology, rhetoric and legislation, has in fact been integrating with the United States since the early 1950s when the financial systems were linked.
