The new century is off to a surprising start in Latin America. The continent that had been a privileged territory for neoliberalism, where it was first applied—in Chile and Bolivia—rapidly turned into the leading arena not only for resistance but for construction of alternatives to neoliberalism. Two faces of the same coin: precisely by having been the laboratory for neoliberal experiments, Latin America is now having to deal with their conse¬quences. The 1990s and the 2000s have been two radically opposite decades. During the 90s, the neoliberal model was imposed to varying degrees in virtually every country on the continent—with the exception of Cuba. Clinton, who did not even cross the Rio Grande to sign the first North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), was forced not long after to approve a super-loan from Washington when the first crisis of the new model broke out in Mexico. The us went on to press for a hemi¬sphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (ftaa), presenting this as the natural outcome of the seamless extension of free-trade policies.

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