Review of Debt & Democracy in Latin America

Foremost among the issues and problems facing Third World countries today is, as with the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the economic-political symbiosis. Developing countries by definition want economic development, but what of political development? Might an inherent dilemma face those who would pursue both economic development and democracy? That is, can industrialization be built on peasant ballots, not just on peasant backs? Posited in the contemporary Latin American context, what was the relationship between economic debt and political democracy in the 1980s, and what does that mean for the 1990s?