Transatlantic reflections

THE late Carlos Fuentes, a Mexican writer, compared the exercise of mutual influence between Spain and its former colonies to “a mirror: looking from the Americas to the Mediterranean, and back”. Those transatlantic reflections continue—and reach far across Mare Nostrum—in ways that would have seemed surprising only a few years ago.

Seen from Latin America, the agonies of the euro zone arouse a sickening sense of déjà vu. The limits on withdrawals from Greek banks mimic the corralito (“little fence”) imposed by Domingo Cavallo, Argentina’s finance minister in 2001, in a doomed attempt to preserve his country’s currency board, which pegged the peso at par to the dollar for a decade.