The Missing Cold War: Reflections on the Latin American Debt Crisis, 1979-89

During the 1980s, virtually all major Latin American countries were involved in a vicious cycle of indebtedness, hyperinflation, austerity, stagnation and new indebtedness. The immediate causes, and the size of the debt itself, varied from country to country, but the analogies prevailed to the point that the 1980s entered Latin America’s collective memory as ‘the lost decade’. This article uses the Latin American debt crisis as a sort of local prism to interpret the global significance of the very different attitudes taken on the occasion by the United States and the Soviet Union. In general, the story of the Latin American debt crisis highlights that a US-centred unipolar order had already emerged in a vast area of the Third World, almost one decade before the ‘official’ end of the US-Soviet bipolar confrontation.