Global Banks and Latin American Dictators, 1974–1982

Abstract

<jats:p>This article examines the relationship between international commercial banks and military regimes in South America. The focus is on how military regimes in the Southern Cone of Latin America and Brazil in the 1970s became heavily dependent on foreign capital provided by international banks based in Britain and France. It makes use of previously unavailable archival evidence to examine the interactions between international banks and South American governments, showing how these interactions intensified once military rule was established. It shows that international capital was used for a wide variety of purposes, including arms imports. When global banks cut loans once the debt crisis erupted in 1982, they aggravated the economic crisis but also fostered democratic change.</jats:p>

The U. S. Commercial and Investment Banks, the Eurocurrency Markets, and the International Economy: from the Late 1970s Through the Start of the 1980s

“…Moreover, more recent studies shared a few more research approaches tackled and challenged in this article. The totality of the finest studies recently appeared on the one side were consistent with this narrowed approach to the Eurodollar and other Eurocurrency markets; on the other, this top-notch scholarship analysed and reconstructed the development of unregulated markets either through the perspective of very specific dealers and investors such as the leading European banks [1], or by means of exploring the pattern of borrowers, as it was the case of the LDCs borrowing trajectories with respect to their debt and the foreign financing of their investments since the 1970s [3,2], as well as through an institutional approach to the topic focused for instance on the role and intervention of world-class economic institutions such as the U. S. financial and monetary authorities or the OECD [32,33,41].…”

Friends or foes? Brazil, the IMF and the World Bank, 1961–1967

“…Kedar has carried out extensive analyses of the relationship between the WB and the Argentine dictatorship of the 1970s (Kedar 2019a, 2019b) and between the WB, the IMF and Pinochet's Chile (Kedar 2017, 2018). García-Heras has concentrated on the international financial relations of the Argentine military junta (Garcia-Heras 2018a, 2018b), while Altamura has focused on European commercial banks and their activities in Latin America (Altamura 2020; Altamura and Flores 2020). With regards to Brazil, however, studies are few, especially ones that focus on the post-1964 period.…”