Introduction

Latin America in the current neoliberal era of worldwide capitalist development has turned into a veritable laboratory of different alternative pathways to development. This chapter reviews the dynamics of what might be understood as the new geoeconomics of capital in Latin America and the corresponding politics and realities. It turns to and elaborates on certain dynamics associated with the advance of resource-seeking ‘extractive’ capital. The chapter provides a brief discussion of the forces implicated in what appears to be the end of this progressive cycle. It analyses the development and resistance dynamics of these forces of change. Developing countries such as Mexico and Brazil, in this context, could try to insert themselves into those chains on the basis of their ‘strategic advantages’ but national industrial policies were for a bygone era. It establishes the meaning and delimits the use of the notion ‘alternatives to development’.