Now that the nations of the Americas have emerged from the trauma of the debt debâcle of the 1980s and are well on their way to overcoming the effects of the Mexican financial crisis of 1994, it is useful to examine more closely the instruments that brought the region through this turbulent period. During this time, in which Latin America had neither direction nor resources, the policies were incubated that propelled a prodigious transformation in the economies and governance, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) matured into a major resource for the American nations.