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Latin Americans Take a Step Into the Economic Mainstream : Trade: Officials speak of <i> apertura,</i> opening up to the free flow of international commerce. Experts say concrete reforms are needed.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

For much of the 20th Century, Latin America has anguished over its economic underdevelopment. Its failure to achieve industrial power and prosperity has been blamed on everything from Iberian absolutism and Yankee imperialism to capital flight and foreign debt.

Now, as the century wanes, a consensus seems to be taking shape, if not on the reasons for Latin American underdevelopment, at least on a basic requirement for growing out of it: Latin America must successfully compete in the expanding global marketplace.

The key to that, in a word, is apertura (Spanish), or abertura (Portuguese). It means opening up Latin American economies to the free flow of international commerce, getting into the world mainstream of technology, productivity and capital.

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A new wave of elected presidents in major Latin American countries is placing high hopes on such a common policy. From Mexico to Argentina, apertura has become an official slogan in the drive for development.

Although the idea is not new, it has never attracted such wide attention.

Beginning in the 1930s, major Latin American countries erected import barriers aimed at fostering domestic industry and saving foreign currency. The “import substitution” policy prevailed into the 1980s, when it became clear that protected industries were often inefficient and outdated.

Economic growth in the region all but stopped. Latin America’s share of world trade fell in the 1980s from 6% to 3.5%.

Strapped countries had to reduce their imports drastically, not only to balance trade accounts but to make payments on billions of dollars in foreign debt. As a result, the United States lost sales to a region that had been one of its best customers for manufactured products. In 1981, 20% of U.S. exports went to Latin America; in 1987, it was 14%.

Throughout the 1980s, Washington preached apertura as a remedy for Latin America’s problems. Chile and Mexico have had some success with the policy, setting an example that is being heeded elsewhere.

Presidents Carlos Andres Perez of Venezuela and Carlos Saul Menem of Argentina are putting apertura into practice. President Fernando Collor de Mello of Brazil, inaugurated in March, has voiced strong support for the policy. So have Presidents-elect Cesar Gaviria of Colombia and Alberto Fujimori of Peru.

The U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, once an advocate of import substitution, said in a May report that apertura is in.

The report, titled “Changing Production Patterns with Social Equity,” said the “prevailing idea in the region is that the present state of affairs calls for a progressively greater exposure of production units to external competition.”

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Economists emphasize that apertura is not a magic wand. They say it must come with fiscal reforms, investment capital and new technology if Latin America is to share in the world boom in high-tech exports.

More than two-thirds of the region’s exports are primary commodities, including petroleum, and “a country’s possibility of entering international markets on a solid footing” depends largely on “its ability to keep up with international trends in technology,” the U.N. commission’s report said.

Some people say the United States could profit by helping Latin America catch up and keep up. As they see it, the United States could be elbowed aside by a united Germany and Japan. They see a capitalist revitalization of Latin America as a counterweight.

“It is what some American diplomats and politicians think and want,” Roberto Campos, a conservative Brazilian senator and former finance minister, said recently. Unfortunately, he said, potential investors are reluctant in the face of obsolete nationalism, unrealistic unionism and terrorist violence.

In an article this month, Campos said Latin America is more likely to be left an economic backwater. In the decades of adversarial U.S.-Soviet relations, the West was interested in keeping Latin America in the capitalist camp, he said. But today, socialism is not viewed as a threat.

“The Third World lost its blackmail power,” Campos said.

It can be argued either way. Other analysts say the relaxation of Cold War tension should benefit Latin America because the countries of the region will turn from security to economic concerns, to developing stronger trade relations not only with the United States but with other industrialized countries.

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But David Ronfeldt, a political scientist with RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, contends that regardless of East-West dynamics, Latin America appears to be heading for “the failure of democracy and a plunge into a new dark age.”

Ronfeldt wrote in Hemisphere, a publication of Florida International University, that drug cartels, guerrillas, economic stagnation and political disarray are likely to erode the fragile democracies, leading to new takeovers by dictators and demagogues of the right and left. His dismal scenario calls for increased violence in the region and less trade and investment by developed countries.

The country most likely to avoid the “new dark age,” Ronfeldt said, is Mexico. He advises the United States to keep its distance from the turmoil in the rest of the region while working to bring Mexico into a North American economic bloc.

Peter F. Drucker, a professor of social sciences at the Claremont Graduate School, argues that the United States may find great economic opportunity--greater than in East Europe--not only in Mexico but throughout Latin America. He has suggested that the United States could reduce its trade deficit by reviving Latin America as a customer for its manufactured goods.

“It would be a great deal easier to turn around Latin America than to turn around Eastern Europe,” Drucker wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

Latin America can feed itself, and it has well-trained engineers, entrepreneurs, accountants, economists and lawyers. It also has long experience with market economies and billions of dollars of capital--kept abroad because of insecurity at home.

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The amount of Latin American money overseas is estimated at more than $200 billion. Drucker observes that if this capital were invested in Latin American industries that could compete in international markets, it could launch all but the most backward of the region’s countries into rapid economic development.

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