The World That Latin America Created

The Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) has long fascinated scholars, maybe because of its association with prominent intellectuals from the region: Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Transnational institutions such as CEPAL—founded in 1948—were seen as key players in shaping postwar Latin America's path and have received disproportionate scholarly attention. Part of CEPAL's appeal as a lens to study economic development policy in Latin America was its institutional continuity, through decades of major political and economic turmoil. Its intellectual appeal was greatest in its first decade, before the Cuban Revolution offered a very different proposal on how to advance human well-being and address economic inequality.Fajardo appears intrigued by the hope for progress that CEPAL represented, but her book does not offer an analysis of its historical impact in the development era. What drives her narrative are the trajectories of key figures associated with the CEPAL project, findings she presents thematically rather than chronologically. The narrative includes elements that one could think of as biographical vignettes, others as institutional history, and yet others as reflections on the broader political context in which the cepalinos tried to analyze and shape postwar Latin America. The narrative does not reveal an overarching question or argument, which presents a fundamental challenge for the reader. The pieces—whether paragraphs, longer sections, or chapters—tell interesting stories, but Fajardo does not offer an assessment of how significant CEPAL was in the bigger scope of the region's postwar history.The title of the book certainly overstates CEPAL's significance and raises fundamental conceptual questions. How do Fajardo and the historians of economic thought she cites define “Latin America”? How did that Latin America “create” a world, and, concretely, what was the “world” that had been created? The intellectuals at the heart of Fajardo's story—whether cepalinos or dependentistas—may have envisioned a different world from the one they faced, but their influence was too weak and fleeting to create that alternative world. And how would “Latin America” be the creator of such a world, other than in the most abstract and ultimately imaginary terms? In his masterful Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil (1996), Joseph Love recognized these limitations and framed his analysis in conceptually precise and carefully contextualized terms, avoiding the vague generalizations that characterize Fajardo's title and narrative.Fajardo does not categorize the approach to development that the cepalinos took as a failure, although the evidence she has assembled could justify such a claim. A critical reader might conclude that the alternative proposed by the Cuban Revolution—as a model of how to build a just society and preserve human dignity—undermined the path to a technocratic solution as envisioned by CEPAL economists. The historical conflicts over access to land intensified with rapid rural population growth in the mid-twentieth century, fueling an ever more polarized politics in many parts of Latin America. The response to the Cuban Revolution brought the underlying tensions out into the open, with the United States supporting military takeovers and counterinsurgency policies in Latin America and beyond—making regional development projects a lower priority. The shift toward dependency theory implicitly acknowledged that political reality.For Latin America, the half century after the end of World War II was a period of disruptions: rapid demographic growth, serious economic volatility, and violent political struggles. Trying to make sense of them in the moment was difficult enough, but implementing an innovative and ambitious economic development project in such unsettled times was impossible. A rereading of Journeys toward Progress, Albert O. Hirschman's deeply insightful 1963 study of economic policymaking in Latin America, makes clear why nobody should have expected the peace and stability that development projects depend on. Both cepalinos and dependentistas lost the ability to shape development policy, between the Cuban Revolution and the US-supported military regimes, and neither line of thinking congealed into a coherent school of economic thought as an alternative to the emerging neoliberal hegemony. Fajardo constructs her narrative as if there was such a story to tell about the cepalinos, but her own evidence contradicts that interpretation.The strength of Fajardo's book lies in its reconstruction of moments of fracture, when the dream of a journey toward progress shaped by CEPAL's founding ideas came apart. Tracing the political trajectory of some of the more prominent figures is a good way to understand that unraveling, although the Cuban angle may have deserved greater attention. The reflections on prominent cepalinos and dependentistas give us a sense of the challenges they faced trying to propose a coherent development policy. The book remains fragmentary, however, and therefore hard to follow. More careful editing to catch persistent problems with word choice and sentence structure would have helped, but ultimately the title of the book reflects a conceptual overreach that does not align with the historical record

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