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The starting point of this article is the recognition that crisis is a constant when analyzing Latin America. This article asks how do political democracy and economic liberty interact in this region, considering that both are fundamental to development. After an analysis of Latin American diversity, the paper poses the question "Has the "end" of history reached Latin America with the liberal reforms in the region in the 1990s?", and concludes that the actual crisis is not due to a failure of the liberal model but rather to its limited application and lack of transparency. The paper ends with the suggestion that the region needs the "Chilean consensus", less orthodox than the Washington Consensus, but whose foundation is the transformation of the country's mentality, forming the base of its success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the relationship between the performance of Latin American stock markets with their real economies, applying seven econometric models for the cases of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico. The relationship between stock market yields in these countries and their respective GDPS is examined and compared, applying to the series for each country unit root tests, cointegration analysis, error correction model analysis, Granger causality modeling, self-regression vector analysis, stimulus and response functions, and variance decomposition analysis. The series comprise the following stock markets: Argentina's MERVAL, Brazil's BOVESPA, Chile's IGPA, and Mexico's IPC, as compiled by Economática. The GDP series were obtained from the Cepalstat data base. The series are monthly and are for the period 1993-2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]