It is now clear the Latin American debt crisis that followed Mexico's 1982 payments difficulties represented the death of an exhausted economic model. The consequence of this was a long period of painful economic decline. It is equally clear that the crisis delivered a fatal blow to military governments across the region. But he says that the deeper parallels are with 1982. It is not a cyclical problem.
Some economists are more forthright still.
The Asian strategy typically involved strong state intervention and direction of investment decisions - just what Latin America had gone through from the late 1940s to the 1970s. In Latin America, this had yielded high growth rates until inefficiencies in the allocation of resources were finally revealed by the 1980s crisis. It is true that there are significant differences. In comparison with Asia, Latin American countries were closed to trade and ran inflationary economic policies. But both Latin America in the 1970s and Asia in the 1990s were using imported capital to help generate high investment rates.