Transatlantic reflections
Populist parallels between Europe and Latin America
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.
This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "Transatlantic reflections"
From the July 18th 2015 edition
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