ned or dominated the production of agricultural products for export, especially in Central America, crude petroleum and mineral mined in Mexico and South America. Before and just after the Second World War, nationalist revolutions in key countries such as Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela reduced or eliminated American control over the production of some commodities, but Latin America for the most part remained an American trading fiefdom until the 1980s.
For Latin America, the period 1913-1945 produced alternating cycles of rapid economic growth and stagnation/decline, the latter being especially sharp during the Great Depression when international trade collapsed and international commodity prices plummeted.
Fueled by nationalist sentiment, many less developed countries turned after World War II to national economic planning and forced industrialization as a solution to their political, economic and social woes and in particular sought to reduce their dependence on the developed world by adopting policies such as high tariffs and restrictive import licensing which protected domestic producers and fostered the development of import substitution industries, such as the processing of agricultural products. Little says the Latin American experiment in central planning was generally "weak."
The rapid economic growth of the region in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s could not be sustained because it was accompanied by political turmoil, corruption, domestic budgetary deficits, excessive foreign borrowing and their attendant consequences, including rampant inflation, which after the middle 1950s accelerated at an explosive rate. During the 1970s and especially after the oil shocks of 1973-1974 and 1979, almost all the nations of Latin America suffered from declining commodity export prices, recessions in the developed world which reduced demand for their exports and rising costs for the importation of fuel. They incurred very large d...