In less than seven months, three men named Carlos assumed the presidencies in Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina and produced the most important policy turnaround of the postwar era in these three countries. In December 1988, Carlos Salinas de Gortari from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was inaugurated as president of Mexico. In February 1989, Carlos Andrés Pérez from the Social Democratic Party, Democratic Action (AD), started his term as president of Venezuela. In July 1989, Carlos Menem from the Peronist Party followed suit in Argentina. All three were the candidates of populist labor-based parties, which had supported protectionism and state intervention in the postwar period. Once in office, however, all three presidents actually reduced state intervention and opened their economies, thus moving their labor-based parties away from the policies upon which the historic relationship with their long-term labor allies had been built.

Because these three countries had labor-based parties in power and corporatist labor regulations, the common strain created by their parallel convergence into neoliberalism should have provoked a uniform reaction among labor unions according to the conventional wisdom. However, the patterns of union-government interactions in Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela varied not only across the three countries, but also within them.