Description
On December 1st 2018, the headline of the Mexican newspaper La Jornada announced “Vuelco a la historia; culminan 36 años de neoliberalismo” (“Historic U-turn: the end of 36 years of neoliberalism”). On this day, Andrés Manuel López Obrador became the first left-wing president in modern Mexican history. La Jornada’s headline is illuminating. It highlights that in 1982 - the year of the developing world’s Debt Crisis - Mexican history changed course as the country left behind political and economic traditions that had characterised its developmental strategy for most of the twentieth century, and adopted “Neoliberalism” – a system of economic practices marked by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade – as a guiding ideology. Mexico was not the only country in Latin America to enter a new economic and political phase after 1982. Most countries in Latin America that had benefited from the easy money during the 1970s entered a period of deep economic, social and political turbulences known as the década perdida or “lost decade” marked by stagnating, if not declining, standards of living. In need of financial support to avoid a complete economic meltdown, Latin American countries, partly under the influence of international creditors such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) and Western commercial banks, adopted a series of economic policies to open their economies and redefine the role of the State after half a century of protectionism. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines have studied the multiple facets of the crisis, the lost decade and of the subsequent neoliberal turn. However, contributions by historians have been only sporadic owing to the limited access to primary sources. With the opening to the public of an extraordinary new range of archives, we are now finally able to insert Latin America into the neoliberal narrative by providing the first historical account of the contested process of adoption and implementation of neoliberal reforms in the region’s three largest economies during the 1980s and early 1990s. The project’s core epistemology will revolve around four central aspects of the lost decade: 1) the crisis and the diagnosis; 2) the negotiation and the implementation of the reforms; 3) the search for alternatives to neoliberal orthodoxy; 4) the political impact and legacy of the lost decade. The project team will rely on a wide range of recently disclosed primary sources from twenty-five archival sources located in Europe, the United States and Latin America, some of which are so far totally or partially unexplored. The research project will prove especially relevant to a wide range of scholars interested in the transformations of Latin American societies and the global origins of Neoliberalism; scholars in area studies specialising in Latin America’s contemporary economic and political history but also to practitioners and researchers from government, International Organisations and NGOs interested in economic transformations in the Global South.| Period | Aug 2024 → Jul 2029 |
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| Held at | Universite de Lausanne (University of Lausanne), Switzerland |
| Degree of Recognition | International |