The initiative for the Americas seen from the south

Abstract

President Bush's initiative for the Americas is very characteristic of him, as we met in the Persian Gulf War. It is a potentially large, momentous, highly strategic initiative that goes to the essentials of the problem of the hemisphere.
Next, we make a very quick reminder of Latin America's economic situation in the 1980s, and then to the trade and economic environment facing the United States when this Initiative was launched by President Bush. Without exaggeration, the situation at the end of the 1980s in Latin America was disastrous, compared to the 1960s and 1970s. The inter-American Development Bank's annual report shows the figures for growth rates. In the 1960s the average real growth rate of the hemisphere was 5.6% per year. In the 1970s it rose to 5.9% and in the 1980s, as of 1985 it was 0.5%. The figures at the end of the decade, 86, 87.88 and 89, are also not very good: 86 is 3.8%; but in 87 we fall back to 3%, in 1988 it is 0.9 and in 1989 it is 0.7. There are countries that walked with very strong negative rates; other countries, as peasants say, were "less worse," but there was near-uniform behavior in the 1980s of economies that stagnated in economic development.