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In recent years it had begun to feel as if Latin America was experiencing a kind of internal continental drift. In the north, the countries were pulling away and out to the Pacific, bound by aspirations for the free market disciplines of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Pacific Alliance, in sharp contrast with the political disunity and economic stasis of the aging Mercosur bloc. However, 2015 was the year that this changed: Colombia struggled as falling oil prices highlighted a weak fiscal base; Mexico continues to frustrate largely due to political risk; and Peru and Chile were subdued as Asian export markets struggled and inward investment slumped.
Meanwhile, president Mauricio Macri’s election caused a seismic shock in the south, as Argentina threw away the previous government’s mismanagement, and with it economic inertia and a moribund financial system. With renewed access to the international markets, the sovereign and the provinces raised record amounts in capital from international investors. In a not unrelated development, Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff was controversially – and as yet not definitively – removed from power.
To add another dynamic, central America and the Caribbean generated positive energy as their economies – oil importers and tied to a growing US economy – took the strain in trying to lift the region’s aggregate economic growth rate.