ABSTRACT
The political economy of globalization and regionalism in the Americas has been marked for a set of major historical events since the 1980s. In 1994, the US administration, with the support of Canada and Mexico, launched George W. Bush’s “Enterprise for the Americas,” a project to assemble a hemispheric area of free trade from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, in the spirit of market-led development of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and engineered to absorb the South American Economies (2002). With the annex of Mexico into NAFTA and neoliberalism becoming the creed of development in the Americas, little doubt was initially cast on the supremacy of market enterprise on that continent. However, at the Summit of the Americas in 2004, set with the purpose of accepting the deal, a germinal association of South American governments unexpectedly brought to an end the North American’s initiative, with Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina refusing to accept the project. Since then the political economy of South America has historically turned in a sort of new regional identity which does not fit the model of the dominant ideas of regionalism in either the North American, the European, or the Asian projects. This regional identity was marked by the dynamic of new social forces that emerged in the last two decades of neoliberal reforms, with politics, the return of the state, democracy, and commodities becoming the central drivers of regional development.
