From the streets of Buenos Aires to the highlands of Chiapas, from the Bolivian altiplano to the barrios of Caracas, the last two decades have produced a vibrant and varied series of oppositions to the neoliberal doctrines that were implemented across Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s. The impression of a leftward continental drift was seemingly confirmed by a string of electoral successes for nominally progressive forces: after Chávez in 1998 came Lula in 2002, followed in the next six years by Kirchner, Tabaré Vázquez, Morales, Bachelet, Ortega, Correa and Lugo—a trend that prompted many to announce the demise of the Washington Consensus, and to ask whether Latin America might turn from being its privileged victim to its chief gravedigger.

Michael Reid’s Forgotten Continent is expressly designed to counter such illusions. Far from being discredited, in Reid’s view the policies of the Washington Consensus were responsible for substantial improvements in the region’s economic position. Though much maligned, it is they that have enabled Latin America to experience stability in recent years, and to begin to close the gap dividing it from the developed world. But if the gains made in the 1990s are to be consolidated, Reid argues, there must be continuity in economic policy and, above all, political stability to ensure a predictable environment for investors, domestic and foreign. The principal burden of his book is to make the case for persevering with the economic recipes of the 1990s, and for a politics of consensus that would prevent any damaging polarizations along class or ideological lines. As models for this brand of pragmatism Reid cites the governments of Lula and the Concertación coalition of Chile, representatives of a left-of-centre ‘democratic reformism’ that needs to be distinguished from the ‘populist autocracy’ of Chávez. The latter, in Reid’s view, poses a serious threat to the region, his redistributive policies a temptation to which electorates must not succumb if the progress made in recent decades is to be preserved and extended.

The remedies offered by Chávez and his imitators are unsustainable in the long run, argues Reid, and can only set Latin America further back on its slow road to prosperity. But he also insists that the region’s rulers must undercut the appeal of such measures by tackling in earnest the vast inequalities that have provided populism with its fuel—and which have also acted as a brake on development. It is here that the Washington Consensus is in need of some refurbishment, according to Reid, since it failed sufficiently to emphasize the need for equity alongside growth. Governments in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and elsewhere have sensibly remained committed to the principal macroeconomic tenets of the 1990s; they must now seek to combine this stance with judicious, ‘targeted’ social spending that will enable them ‘to create greater political and socio-economic equity without endangering the conditions for profitable private investment and thus for sustainable economic growth’.

Written between 2004 and 2007, Forgotten Continent is the product of Reid’s first-hand experience of the neoliberal ascendancy in the region. A member of the London squatters’ movement in the 70s—radical sympathies he has obviously jettisoned since—Reid travelled to Latin America in the 1980s, and reported on Peru for the bbc, Guardian and Economist. He joined the staff of the latter in 1990 to cover first Mexico and Central America, then Brazil, before returning to London to edit its ‘Americas’ section in 1999. No surprise, then, that much of the book echoes the tone of the Economist—the text is peppered with magazine-style evocations of dusty Oaxacan villages or the ‘grubby, dynamic chaos’ of the conos of Lima, and selected locals are ventriloquized to add human interest to various of Reid’s points (‘people are living a little better nowadays, conceded Panfilo Santiago, the municipal councillor in charge of education’). But Forgotten Continent does more than simply transfer to a broader canvas the arguments Reid deploys on a weekly basis in his day job. It is written with a pressing sense of ideological purpose: to guard against the unravelling of the good work done in the 1990s, and to bolster mainstream certainties that may have been shaken by the Argentine default or the radical turn in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.

In that sense, it represents the summation of a new consensus on Latin America—a status amply reflected in the book’s reception in establishment circles, where it has been the object of uniform approval. The dust-jacket boasts enthusiastic puffs from Fernando Henrique Cardoso—‘insightful’, ‘a must-read’—and Jorge Castañeda: ‘both a necessary tool and a delightful read’; James Dunkerley adds his endorsement too, calling the book ‘formidably well informed’. Reviews in the Anglophone press have been similarly laudatory: in the uk it has been deemed ‘scholarly’ and ‘meticulous’ (Guardian), ‘persuasive’ and ‘powerful’ ( ft ); in the us, ‘brilliantly researched’ (New York Times), ‘not likely to be superseded for some time’ (Weekly Standard), and ‘comprehensive and erudite’ (Washington Post). Col. McKay of the us Naval Institute insisted that the Obama administration’s hemispheric ‘decision makers’ have this ‘excellent work on their must-read list’, while in Foreign Affairs, Francis Fukuyama concluded that ‘Reid is clearly right that a battle for Latin America’s soul is unfolding today’.

The moralizing urgency behind Reid’s sonorous subtitle is intended to convey a sense of frustration with Western policy-makers, whom he believes to have ‘forgotten’ an entire continent amid the distractions of Iraq and the War on Terror. This too seems to be an article of faith for writers of the Anglo-Saxon establishment: thus Fukuyama observed in Foreign Affairs that ‘eyes immediately glaze over’ at the mere mention of the region, while in Foreign Policy in May 2006, former Venezuelan trade minister Moisés Naím anticipated Reid by declaring that Latin America had become ‘Atlantis—the lost continent’, having ‘disappeared from the maps of investors, generals, diplomats and journalists’. Naím’s article is in fact one of a number of forerunners to Reid in the elaboration of the new consensus: it too praises Lula and Lagos as ‘models of more responsible economic governance’, and argues for ‘tempered’ solutions to Latin America’s ills; apparently, the region’s ‘most important deficit is patience’. In their 2004 edited volume After the Washington Consensus, John Williamson and Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski—respectively, the British codifier of the Washington Consensus and a former Peruvian prime minister—likewise advocated ‘patience’, and the need to pursue ‘realistic’ policies ‘steadfastly’; though they also recommend ‘paying more attention to the social agenda’. In 2006, oecd economist Javier Santiso similarly endorsed Lula’s and Lagos’s pragmatic accommodations to the economic status quo, in his evocatively titled The Political Economy of the Possible.

Jorge Castañeda, meanwhile, made an important intervention the same year by proposing, in a Foreign Affairs article, a distinction between two Latin American lefts—one ‘modern, open-minded, reformist’, the other ‘nationalist’, ‘strident’ and populist—and urging that Western policy-makers support the former and work to contain the latter. Long before this, of course, Castañeda had concluded in Utopia Unarmed (1993) that ‘the moderate left’s only true leverage’ was ‘being a lesser evil’, and that ‘the only thing left to fight for is a future that is simply the present, plus more of the same’. Since Reid’s book appeared, such views have been buttressed by a volume entitled Falling Behind (2008), edited by Fukuyama, who exhorts Latin America to ‘follow sensible economic policies’ while also ‘constructing smart social policies’ to deal with inequality, which remains ‘a source of political instability’.