It would be difficult, if not impossible, to overstate the relevance that the United Nations Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, CEPAL) and dependency theory have had on international debates about inequalities between central and peripheral countries – the very fact that we use these two categories, first coined by CEPAL's executive secretary Raúl Prebisch in the 1950s, is telling about how these terms came to be indispensable to describe such situations. Rivers of ink have been dedicated to CEPAL and dependency theory since their consolidation in the 1950s and 1960s and, quite revealingly, the subject keeps attracting the attention of scholars up to this day. Writing a new account of such a commented-upon topic is therefore a considerable challenge, yet Margarita Fajardo greatly succeeds at it, offering in The World that Latin America Created a new, insightful and highly detailed story of the legacy of CEPAL and dependency theory, and its impact on global intellectual history.
Apart from the impressive archival research underpinning the book and the effective contextualisation of the circumstances surrounding the emergence of the cepalino project, first, and dependency theory, later, one of this work's main strengths is its engaging narrative. The story that Fajardo elegantly tells leads the reader to the different stages of this ground-breaking period in the history of Latin American ideas. As the author states in the epilogue, the book aims to contribute to new studies in global history by situating actors and theories within Latin America, reconstructing very local and national debates, imagining – she argues – ‘Latin America in its own right’ (p. 206).
The book is thus structured chronologically, starting with the creation of CEPAL at the UN Economic and Social Council in 1948; the establishment of its offices in Santiago, Chile; and the incorporation of its most representative figure, Argentine economist Prebisch. During his first year in Santiago, Prebisch published his famous manifesto, ‘The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems’, in which he laid the foundations of ‘the cepalino worldmaking project’ (p. 42). In this essay, he famously explained his thesis of the declining terms of trade between centre and periphery. Fajardo argues that it was the conjunction of the institution, the figure of Prebisch, and the manifesto that gave international prominence to this new vision of the world.
The following three chapters focus on the concrete actions that cepalinos took towards materialising their project, with a main goal in mind: to overcome the inequality in the terms of trade that hindered the development of the periphery. CEPAL thus established training centres in Rio de Janeiro and other Latin American capitals; marshalled a technique of programming, which combined macroeconomic considerations with by-sector targets; and saw itself involved in different political initiatives across the region. Displaying an extensive use of archival research, Fajardo revises in detail some of the most relevant ones, such as the engagement of cepalino economist Celso Furtado in the creation of the Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Económico (National Bank for Economic Development) during the Getúlio Vargas administration in Brazil, and the launching of the cepalino project at the economic forum in Quintadinha in 1954, as well as the creation of the Central American cooperation project, through which CEPAL economists envisioned a customs-free union to boost trade between member countries.
As Fajardo argues, the increasing influence of cepalinos in Latin America was not always welcomed by other international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In fact, she dedicates a whole chapter to the discussion between the structuralist approach to inflation championed by CEPAL, and the monetarist approach held by the IMF, a topic well covered in the literature. However, her key contribution consists of the reconstruction of the ways in which these two approaches were disputed in concrete situations, most notably in the involvement of both institutions in the development programme ‘Plano de Metas’ of Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek, a successor to Vargas.
Perhaps the most interesting section dedicated to cepalinos is the fourth chapter, ‘Revolutions Left and Right’, in which the author traces the involvement of CEPAL economists in two opposing projects: the Cuban Revolution and the US aid programme for Latin America ‘Alliance for Progress’. What is most interesting about these two projects is that they began to delineate what would become CEPAL's main antagonist: dependency theory. CEPAL organised a short-lived mission to Cuba to offer the revolutionary government economic advice, yet this cooperation was soon terminated after Castro's regime began to adopt a more confrontational stance against the United States, contradicting CEPAL's favourable stance on cooperation between centre and periphery. Cepalinos were generally more trade-prone than what the increasingly socialist rhetoric of the Cuban regime tolerated. Prebisch and Furtado also took part in conversations with the US government regarding the Alliance for Progress, whose main aim was, precisely, to counterbalance the influence of the Cuban Revolution. Yet, this collaboration also fell short of the expectations harboured by cepalinos.
In offering a detailed history of such collaborations, the book carefully reconstructs the rise and fall, as well as the alternative successes and failures, of CEPAL's project for developing the periphery and combatting global inequality. One of the book's most notable contributions is the careful account of the shift, especially from the Left's point of view, in the perception of CEPAL from the ‘IMF of the Left’ to an institution too compliant with global capitalism. It was precisely a theory based on cepalino ideas, dependency theory, which became its main contender.
The second part of the book thus focuses on the history of dependency, by analysing the trajectories of its two most representative groupings: the Brasilia group, comprised of Brazilians Theotônio dos Santos, Vânia Bambirra, Rui Mauro Marini and, prominently, economist André Gunder Frank; and the São Paulo group, whose main figure was Brazilian sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Fajardo analyses in these last chapters the different strands of dependency theory represented by these groups, which often contradicted each other, tracing the intellectual trajectories of these prominent figures. The author shows how these two strands ‘aspired to usurp’ the hegemony of CEPAL, while relying at the same time on the concept of centre and periphery, which ‘placed the problem of the historical expansion of global capitalism front and centre in the discussion of Latin America's trajectory’ (p. 165).
Finally, the epilogue tells the quite fascinating story about the irradiation of dependency ideas onto very different intellectual and political projects across the world: from Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory to Samir Amin's advocacy for dependency ideas in Africa, to the 1974 UN Charter for a New International Economic Order. The author reconstructs the impact that dependency theory had beyond Latin America and after the late 1960s on international conversations about world inequality. This section is perhaps too short, as the story of how dependency became so influential – even when this influence has not been fully acknowledged – is indeed fascinating, opening an avenue for future research on this topic.
In sum, The World that Latin America Created is an indispensable book for any person, within and outside academia, interested in the history of economic and social ideas. It is grounded on a Latin American perspective, telling the story of how this region's intellectuals came to shape a particular vision of the world with ample international impact. Exceptionally well-written and documented, this book is bound to become an essential work within Latin American studies.
