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The scene is fresh in my mind. It was the early 1980s, and the Reagan administration's antics in Central America and Grenada were reviving the campus left. The crowd filling a Yale University common room sat in anticipation, fingering through dog-eared copies of Dependency and Development in Latin America, the magnum opus of dependency theory. One of its authors, Brazilian sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso (later president of his country), was about to arrive. His attire was the first shock. Cardoso, then a senator from Sao Paulo, showed up wearing an impeccable blue suit, not the fatigues half the attendees were expecting. After he gave a short speech on Brazilian political tactics, not the ills of imperialism, a woman in a poncho fired the first question: Did democracy mean anything in Brazil without socialism? Yes it did, replied Cardoso. And building socialism was no longer the issue; perfecting capitalism was. Students sitting at his feet stared in disbelief and soon began milling out.
Dependency was a theory of underdevelopment: Poor countries exiled to the periphery of the world economy could not develop as long as they remained enslaved by the rich nations of the center. Dependency was also a religion that shaped the cosmology of a generation of Latin American leftists in the 1960s and 1970s and of leaders from Chilean President Salvador Allende to the Nica-raguan Sandinistas. As would happen again with other half-digested foreign theories-deconstruc-tion is the best example-U.S. college campuses embraced dependency with evangelical fervor. Mixed with Vietnam-era rhetoric, dependency theory became a potent brew, which placed all blame for Third World problems on the hegemonic center, particularly the United States. Cardoso himself worried about this tendency. In a 1977 article published in the Latin American Research Review titled "The Consumption of Dependency Theory in the United States," he warned against oversimplifications and against assuming that all of Latin America's problems were foreign made.
Dependency came in two flavors: The radical one, cooked up by economists Andre Gunder Frank and Amir Samin, claimed that the center grew at the expense of the periphery. The only solution was to delink completely from the world economy. From the start, however, radical dependency faced its share of troubles. Armies of graduate students tried to find a...