The word “crisis” is inherent to Latin America. Throughout two centuries of independent history, the region has gone through many crises. Some triggered from abroad and others self-induced, the majority generated in the interface between domestic and international affairs. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), however, the crisis of 2020–2021, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, has been the worst in 120 years. In 2020, the region’s economy contracted by 7.7 percent (versus 3.5 percent for the world economy), per capita income fell to 2010 levels, and poverty levels to those of 2006. As a result, in 2021, 33.7 percent of the region’s population, one in three Latin Americans, lives below poverty levels (ECLAC 2021). Data indicate that the region faces another lost decade, this time between 2015 and 2025, since the 2015–2019 five-year period was already one of slow growth. Although the pandemic has affected the entire world, there have been regions that have emerged as winners (such as East Asia) and others that have done so as losers (such as Latin America) in the wake of this humanitarian catastrophe. The outlook of a stagnant region, one that is caught in the middle-income trap in that every 30 or 40 years it goes through a “lost decade” in which everything achieved in the previous 10 years fades away and demands a new start, is nothing less than overwhelming, to put it mildly.

What hope for the future can the 660 million Latin Americans have in these circumstances?

The previous lost decade in the region, in the eighties, was triggered by an event beyond its borders—the rise of interest rates in the United States in 1982, which led to the so-called “debt crisis.” The same is true for the current crisis, triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, which arose in 2020 from a virus that emerged in Wuhan, China. Once again, the crisis surprised a fragmented Latin America, making a coordinated response that could have lessened its effects (González et al. 2021), difficult, if not impossible. Far from being a mere addendum to its condition, the region’s location in and interaction with the international political economy is central to its development and progress.