Not surprisingly, most of its aid is aimed at averting the bad, not promoting the good. But for her, sleeping on a pile of dirty blankets, old sweaters and ragged sofas between the roar of a major Mexico City thoroughfare and the hiss of the Metro, the 1990s were probably no better. It's OK here. Veronica is just one of millions of Latin Americans who have yet to taste the fruit of a decade of free markets, open trade and privatizations. In fact, the Inter-American Development Bank says the economic reforms that swept the region like wildfire in the 1990s failed to make a dent in grinding poverty and one of the world's most unequal distributions of wealth.
Statistics speak almost as loudly as grim reality.
Mexico's Inegi statistics institute says the ranks of the poor have been swollen by 9.6 million since 1989, while the top 20 percent of wage earners have 55 percent of the country's wealth. Globally, Brazil is king of the wealth gap. The top 10 percent of Brazilians have 50 percent of national income while the poorest 50 percent share just 10 percent. In Argentina last year, the richest 10 percent earned 25 times as much, on average, as the poorest 10 percent. In 1975, it was just 7.9 times as much.