Decades of negative media attention have reinforced Colombia’s reputation as a violent region controlled by drug cartels. Amy Offner views the nation through a much different lens.
“The world tends to associate places with their dominant problems, even though no country is about just one thing,” laments Offner, an assistant professor of history. “Colombia once symbolized economic development and democratic reform, and its transformation in the mid-20th century can help us understand the origins of our own time in the U.S.”
Offner’s new book, “Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas,” explores how Latin American economic and social welfare initiatives in the years following World War II were later reimagined by U.S. leaders who had very disparate goals in mind.
“We usually think of influence flowing southward in the Western Hemisphere, but I wanted to show how important Latin America was as a laboratory for experiments in public policy,” Offner says. “The book presents neoliberalism as a parasitic phenomenon that appropriated mid-century tools of statecraft used in developing countries and welfare states.”
Read more at Omnia.
