The IMF assured people in 1980, "During the 1970s ... a generalised debt management problem was avoided . . . and the outlook for the immediate future does not give cause for alarm" <sup>.102</sup> This was written just months before the second international recession, in the early 1980s, and caught all these states unprepared. As export markets shrank and international interest rates began to rise, the debts they had incurred in the 1 970s crippled their growth, threw them into recession and blighted their economies right through the 1980s, which became known as "the lost decade" in Latin America, with a fall in GNP per person for the continent as a whole of 10 percent.103
The impact on local capitalists and mainstream political forces was not, however, to question the new opening to the world market. Rather it was to insist, as in Russia and Eastern Europe that the opening had not gone far enough. The new doctrine was accepted in one form or another by the late 1980s by populist politicians and even former guerrillas in Latin America, by the politburo in China, by the Congress Party leadership in India, by those who had once proclaimed their commitment to "socialism" in Africa and by the successors to Nasser in Egypt.
The conversions were not always voluntary. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank intervened where they could, making offers, mafia style, to debt-laden countries which their rulers rarely found themselves able to refuse, since doing so would rule out any sort of accumulation strategy. The various debt programmes were more concerned with protecting the interests of Western banks than with ameliorating conditions in the indebted countries. But more was involved than just a surrender to imperialism on the part of the governments that accepted them. Those capitals, private and state alike, that had grown during the period of state-directed "development" did not see any way of continuing to expand within the confines of limited national markets. They wanted access to markets and to technological innovations outside national borders. They might allow, even encourage, national governments to haggle over the terms on which capital in the metropolitan countries allowed this to happen, but they would not reject them outright. And in the process some of them were indeed able to develop more than a national profile.
So the Argentinian steel maker TechNet took control of the Mexican steel tube maker Tamsa in 1993, acquired the Italian steel tube maker Dalmikne in 1996, and then went on to expand into
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Capitalism in the 20th Century