Per capita income in the region grew by only 11 percent in the 1980s and ’90s, compared to 80 percent in the previous 20 years, the business magazine reports. The past five years have been particularly devastating, registering a gain of barely 1 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund.

In the decade since the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed—an agreement touted as a great boon to the Mexican economy—Mexico has seen less than 1 percent annual growth in per capita Gross Domestic Product. That is one quarter of what was achieved in the decades prior to 1980.

In Brazil, Latin America’s most industrialized country and former showcase of capitalist “success” in the region, the economy grew from 1980 to 2000 at less than an eighth of the rate in the previous 20-year period. In 2003 Brazil’s economy shrank.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” BusinessWeek writer Mark Weisbrot writes. “One would think that after 25 years of reforms—opening up to international trade and investment, privatization of state-owned enterprises, enforcing budget and monetary discipline, and other measures that have caused quite a bit of pain and dislocation to the region’s citizens—these countries would have something to show for it.”

These “reforms” are part of the offensive by Washington and other industrialized powers to open up Latin America to greater penetration by imperialist capital. Such measures include slashing tariffs that Latin American and Caribbean governments have instituted in an attempt to protect their domestic industries from a flood of cheap imported commodities from imperialist countries.

Privatization has meant the sell-off of state-owned companies to capitalist owners, who have laid off workers, slashed wages and benefits, assaulted unions, and jacked up utility rates, while channeling the profits to bank accounts in New York, London, Paris and other centers of finance capital.

What Weisbrot euphemistically calls “enforcing budgetary and monetary discipline” refers to demands by the most powerful industrialized creditor states that governments of semicolonial nations squeeze more and more out of workers and farmers to ensure that debt payments to the imperialists are met.

Over the last two decades, unprecedented wealth has been siphoned out of the treasuries of the nations of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific into the coffers of the world’s wealthiest families in North America, Japan, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Between 1980 and 1997, the foreign debt of semicolonial countries nearly quadrupled from $600 billion to $2.1 trillion, which is more than one-third of their gross domestic product.

The product of this predatory drive—which the BusinessWeek writer and other spokespeople for the wealthy rulers have found so “amazing”—has been an economic and social nightmare for hundreds of millions of workers and farmers throughout Latin America.

Even the dismal figures for economic growth hide the real depth of the crisis. Peru, which has the most impressive growth rate in Latin America—about 4 percent annually since 2001—is facing explosive conditions, as struggles by workers and farmers erupt in response to the consequences of the economic crisis and the government’s efforts to solve it at the expense of working people. Despite a 5.2 percent growth rate in 2002, half of the country’s 27 million inhabitants live below the government-defined poverty line and the official jobless rate is 10 percent.

Peru has recently been shaken by a series of social explosions, including in the rural town of Ilave in the south, where a large crowd of Indian peasants assaulted and killed the mayor in April. Similar explosions have taken place in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile.  
 
 
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