Renovar nuestras ideas: ¡un imperativo!

The problems which face Latin America and the Caribbean are both many and dramatic. To confront those problems it is necessary to reconsider and redevelop our ideas about them. This article is in this reformist tradition. It suggests that the tendency amongst the upper strata of Latin society to follow a consumption pattern typical of core countries occurs at the cost of accumulation of capital, and tends to impose new patterns of both public and private consumption in excess of the growth of productivity. In turn this is a root cause of an inflation which is beyond the power of traditional monetary policy to restrict. The problem of the external debt is then argued to be the product of politics. It does not emerge as a consequence of a policy of import substitution or of inadequate export promotion but more fundamentally as a result of the receptive capacity of core countries. Finally there exist problems which can only be resolved as part of major international currency reform. To achieve this like many of other required reforms there must be an open dialogue, without conceived ideas, between North and South.