Contesting trade in Central America: market reform and resistance. By Rose J. Spalding

Abstract

The onset of neo-liberalism in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s has attracted considerable scholarly attention, as has the subsequent reaction against it in the first decade of the new century, epitomized by the election of a range of left-wing governments and their ostensible rejection or modification of the once sacrosanct economic prescriptions of the Washington Consensus. Few studies consider the period as a whole and fewer still have brought the countries of Central America within their purview. Political scientist Rose Spalding's new book is thus doubly welcome for charting, in one volume, the rise and decline of fundamentalist market reform in a region that has always been more heavily influenced by the asymmetric power of the United States than the larger countries of South America. This is also the first work to examine in any detail the negotiation in 2003–2004 of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with the United States (to which the Dominican Republic has also acceded), the embodiment of the region's move towards a more open economy, and the counter-movement that it engendered due to its profound socio-economic ramifications.