The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era
(Harvard Historical Studies)
by Margarita Fajardo (Author)
How a group of intellectuals and
policymakers transformed development economics and gave Latin America a
new position in the world.
After the Second World War demolished
the old order, a group of economists and policymakers from across Latin
America imagined a new global economy and launched an intellectual
movement that would eventually capture the world. They charged that the
systems of trade and finance that bound the world’s nations together
were frustrating the economic prospects of Latin America and other
regions of the world. Through the UN Economic Commission for Latin
America, or CEPAL, the Spanish and Portuguese acronym, cepalinos
challenged the orthodoxies of development theory and policy.
Simultaneously, they demanded more not less trade, more not less aid,
and offered a development agenda to transform both the developed and the
developing world. Eventually, cepalinos established their own form of
hegemony, outpacing the United States and the International Monetary
Fund as the agenda setters for a region traditionally held under the
orbit of Washington and its institutions. By doing so, cepalinos
reshaped both regional and international governance and set an
intellectual agenda that still resonates today.
Drawing on unexplored sources from the
Americas and Europe, Margarita Fajardo retells the history of dependency
theory, revealing the diversity of an often-oversimplified movement and
the fraught relationship between cepalinos, their dependentista
critics, and the regional and global Left. By examining the political
ventures of dependentistas and cepalinos, The World That Latin America
Created is a story of ideas that brought about real change.
