Latin American Tendencies

The region in the context
of a deep economic crisis

Living a very different economic situation, a recession and a constriction of the world markets, the populist governments are currently confronted with a tough reality: they are not able any more to go on dispensing money abundantly (money which they do not possess), and now they have to adhere the limits which are set by the reality of their countries. Without the capacity to buy supporters or to isolate themselves from the world markets, they are now faced with the need to balance their budgets and control phenomena like unemployment and inflation while their popularity declines more and more and the very bad results of their economic leadership come to light. But, not only the governments forming part of the authoritarian and populist axis, also all governments of the region are seeing their incomes reduced in the middle of recession, increasing unemployment and poverty. Therefore, they will try to alleviate these difficulties with more social programs and more pressure on the enterprises.

Latinamerican TENDENCIES wants to offer a balanced panorama of the reality of our region to its readers: being a bi-annual research report, it is not the typical cyclical bulletinit penetrates the anecdotic to immerse in the tendencies situated above the ordinary point of view- but this does not imply moving to the other extreme which would be a pure and abstract reflection, totally unconnected with the various incidents in the region. Apart from that, this balance refers to the following issues and facts which are to be emphasized: the idea is to connect economic matters with political and social ones. Because of this, we do not present information which is limited to a specific group of countries, but rather information which embraces incidents which otherwise may not be perceived.