Professional Affiliation

Associate Professor, Sarah Lawrence College

Expert Bio

Margarita Fajardo is a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. She specializes in modern Latin American history, particularly in the history of Chile, Brazil, and Colombia, and on the history of economics, economic policymaking, and economic life. Her first book, The World that Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era, received LASA’s Best Book in Politics and Economics in 2023. She has received fellowships from the Duke Center for the History of Political Economy and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. Her publications appear in leading academic journals including the Latin American Research Review and the American Historical Review. She is currently working on a second book project tentatively titled Taming Markets on the history of inflation and commodity regulation in the transition to a neoliberal order in Latin America.

Expertise

• Economics and Globalization
• Global Health
• Global Governance
• Governance
• History
• International Development
• Society and Culture

Wilson Center Project

Taming Markets: Latin America in the Global Neoliberal Era

Project Summary

Taming Markets is a historical investigation of the rise, transformation, and impact of institutions and policies to tame commodity markets and control domestic prices in a context of a sweeping neoliberal turn that promised to freed markets once and for all. Focusing on Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, Taming Markets examines two interrelated stories about the deep transformation of economic life and policy usually referred to as neoliberalism. It traces the fight against foreign debt and rampant inflation as well as the competition between commodity exchanges and futures markets, on the one hand, and commodity agreements and cartels, on the other, that occurred in a period of economic distress at the global level and political repression in the region. The project contributes to the study of the rise of global economic orders and their specific national causes and effects, the economic policies and development plans of right-wing, military regimes, and the rise and transformation of financial instruments in the developing world.

Major Publications

• The World that Latin America Created, Harvard University Press, 2023
• “CEPAL, the International Monetary Fund of the Left? The Tale of Two Global Institutions,” American Historical Review, 128, 2, June 2023