December 26, 2022
CEPR has long been a leader in examining economic and political developments in Latin America. Highlights of our work in 2022 included the following:
- Co-Director Mark Weisbrot joined Joseph E. Stiglitz to author this op-ed for Foreign Policy on the February 2022 agreement between Argentina and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The piece highlighted that this unprecedented agreement “brought the country, and the world, back from the brink of a default that could have threatened the stability of the international financial system.”
- Following the inauguration of Honduras’s first female president, Xiomara Castro, CEPR looked at social and economic indicators since the 2009 military coup that forced the country’s elected president into exile.
- CEPR’s International team released this paper in June ahead of the Presidential election in Columbia. The report examined the Colombian economy, and how the country’s ongoing peace process, political violence and poverty levels may have impacted voter sentiment.
- CEPR Director of International Policy, Alexander Main, penned this piece for NACLA prior to the Summit of the America’s held in June. He noted that “criticisms of the United States and OAS underlined the need to revive regional integration initiatives independent of U.S. influence.”
- CEPR Senior Policy Analyst, Guillaume Long, joined regional integration expert Natasha Suñé to author “ Toward a New UNASUR: Pathways for the Reactivation of South American Integration ”. The report proposes that South American governments relaunch the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), now that administrations committed to the cause of Latin American integration have taken office across South America.
- On the third anniversary of Bolivia’s 2019 coup d’etat, CEPR Economist David Rosnick and Researcher Aileen Wu published Nickels Before Dimes: Misleading Design in Escobari and Hoover’s “Natural Experiment” . They found that claims of fraud in Bolivia’s 2019 elections, detailed in a report by Diego Escobari and Gary Hoover, were based on flawed analysis. David also published a series of blog posts that expand upon the various claims, showing that their conclusions do not hold up.
- Mark Weisbrot wrote an op-ed for Folha de São Paulo , the newspaper with the largest circulation in South America, on the victory of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva over Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s recent election. As Mark noted in the piece, “ Most of the world is rightly celebrating alongside the majority of Brazilians. But the world should know more about how this democracy was lost and about some of the most powerful actors and events that contributed to this loss, so that it does not repeat itself.”
While other US-based organizations might cover developments in Latin America, CEPR ensures that the coverage is honest and fair, as opposed to parroting the US-centric spin. Your donation to CEPR will help us to continue to show how “neoliberal” economic policies supported by the IMF and the US led to a decades-long economic growth failure in Latin America.
