tional commodity prices plummeted.
In the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, nationalist revolutions in key countries such as Argentine, Mexico and Venezuela reduced or eliminated Western, primarily American, control over the production of some commodities, such as crude oil, but Latin America, and especially Central America, remained for the most part an American trading fiefdom.
During the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, many Latin American nations sought to reduce their dependence on the developed world by adopting nationalistic policies, such as restrictions on foreign ownership of many industries, high tariffs, restrictive import licensing and local content requirements. These policies fostered the development of import substitution industries and made Latin American exports less competitive in world markets.
The rapid post-war economic growth of the region 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 debts to banks and governments in the developed world which they could not service.
In Brazil, for example, "the 'economic miracle' of the 1960s and early 1970s . . . gradually subsided in the 1980s, . . . [and Brazil became] the developing world's largest debtor." According to French economist Pierre Beregovoy, external debt servicing by 1989 stood at 40 percent of the value of the region's exports. Mexico and Argentina, as well as others in the region, became international economic basket cases, necessit...