The first panel includes four papers analyzing state-level visions of economic development and their negotiation in the international sphere. Drawing on case studies from Venezuela, Guatemala, Argentina, and Mexico (the latter also considering the U.S. role), these presentations complicate the prevailing vision of a steady march toward neoliberalism fostered by U.S. imperialism. In Venezuela, a “corporate dividend” constituted a strategy to combat leftist guerrilla movements. In dictatorial Guatemala and Argentina, the state originally pursued developmentalist programs, and neoliberal ideas were slow to gain traction. Finally, Mexico became famous for its advocacy of a new international economic order–an advocacy undermined by U.S. and other Global North interests from the beginning, and effectively buried after the 1981 Cancún summit..

The second panel includes four papers that consider the paths of domestic reform that were under construction and disrupted prior to military rule. They examine the plans and models of state-driven economic reform that confronted growing inequalities after the second world war. These more robust roles of government-led economic worldbuilding challenged a newly forming global economic institutional order and were widely embraced on the domestic front. However, they directly challenged the advance of foreign capital and international campaigns to promote export-driven growth models. These papers consider case studies from Brazil, Cuba, Chile and Costa Rica during the period of the 1970s and early 1980s, immediately before the coup-d’etat of neoliberal economic thinking across the region. They challenge the notion that neoliberal economic policies were somehow inevitable and that their alternatives were ever as politically radical as they would later be deemed.