We are watching a hopeful moment in Latin America — voters are turning away from socialist ruin and toward leaders who promise democracy, free markets, and a restoration of economic sanity. Steve Forbes rightly celebrates this shift but warns that an entrenched international bureaucracy, the IMF, could wreck the comeback by forcing toxic, one-size-fits-all prescriptions on these new governments.
The electoral wins are real and consequential: Chile’s voters installed a pro-market president promising tax cuts and deregulation, and Argentina’s experiment in upheaval under Javier Milei continues to reverberate across the region. These results aren’t happenstance; they are a repudiation of the left’s decades of failed economic governance and a demand for policies that let people keep their paychecks and earn a better future.
Yet the IMF keeps pushing familiar remedies — fiscal consolidation and exchange-rate adjustments — that often translate in practice to higher taxes, crippling austerity, and competitive devaluations that punish savers and wage earners. Washington’s friends in Latin America need policies that promote growth, not austerity dressed up as “stability,” and the IMF’s playbook too often ignores the growth side of the ledger.
Consider Argentina: Javier Milei ran on dollarization and radical tax cuts, but when political realities set in his government ended up clinging to the peso and seeking IMF support to prop it up, inviting the very policy compromises voters rejected. That surrender risks turning a promising reform agenda into the same old cycle of inflation, devaluation, and political disappointment.
Conservative principles point the way forward — low, simple taxes; fewer regulations; sound money like dollarization where politically feasible; and legal environments that make it shockingly easy to start and run a business. Latin American leaders who embrace these lessons will trade poverty for prosperity, and they must resist IMF demands that substitute administratively-engineered stability for the dynamism that only free markets can deliver.
Americans who care about freedom and economic opportunity should cheer these reforms and press our government to back pro-growth, pro-democracy partners — not a distant technocracy whose cookie-cutter fixes often enrich bureaucrats and impoverish citizens. If the West wants stable, prosperous neighbors in the Americas, we should support sovereignty, sound-money reforms, and low taxes — and make sure the IMF doesn’t derail the rebirth of liberty in our hemisphere.
