Sovereignty, development and society

Abstract Based on Wilson Cano’s (1999) formulation, we discuss the sovereignty of economic policy in the context of Latin American economies. It is argued that during its historical evolution, the subordination of economic policy to international finance was the main watershed between the developmental period and the period that was established after the 1970s. Latin American economies partially recovered greater autonomy in the new millennium but lost it largely after 2015. It is argued that this took place in an external context quite different from that of the 1980s and 1990s, when reversal was imposed by exchange rate crises and can be explained, in the case of the Brazilian economy, by domestic political reasons. Distributive conflict and denationalization contributed to the triumph of neoliberalism as a dominant accumulation strategy.