Contemporary Latin American approaches to international law, development, and regional integration were forged in the shadow of two imperial systems. The Spanish colonial system produced a cultural and structural narrative of vertically arranged and centrally planned organization. The American commercial system embedded a strong ideology of markets and privatization of control bound together by regulatory effects of markets and organized according to relative market power. In their contemporary and embedded forms, Latin American states oscillate between Western liberalism, indigeneity, and variations of Caribbean Marxism. They swing between rigid hierarchies of centrally planned control and technocratic managerialism of markets.