How CEPAL’s Latin American Theorists Changed Our Understanding of the “Third World”
In the mid-20th century, theorists affiliated with the Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean argued for an international division between the world’s “center” and the “periphery” — terms taken up by Latin Americans to explain and fight exploitation.
General view of the inauguration of the 37th session of CEPAL on May 8, 2018 in Havana, Cuba. (Yamil Lage / AFP via Getty Images)
In 1948, the United Nations created the Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL by its Spanish acronym) to support the region after World War II. Its leading figures developed the notions of “center” and “periphery” to explain the international division of labor and position of “Third World” countries in the global economy. This theory quickly spread across Latin America and the world, inspiring working-class and leftist intellectuals to develop dependency theory, world-systems theory, and more.
For Jacobin Radio’s podcast The Dig, Daniel Denvir spoke to Margarita Fajardo, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and author of The World That Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era, to discuss the origins of CEPAL, the political shift of its intellectuals, and its influence on other theorists across the world. You can listen to the episode here. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Daniel Denvir
Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch developed two insights that shaped CEPAL. The first was that the global economy was divided between the “center” and “periphery.” The second was that the primary commodity — exporting economies on the periphery faced declining terms of trade with the industrialized economies in the center. Explain these two interrelated insights.
Margarita Fajardo
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