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Explores how privatization of state-owned telephone companies led to new consumer movements in Latin America.
This innovative book examines how the privatization and reregulation of the telecommunications sectors in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s provoked the rise of new consumer protest movements in Latin America. Sybil Rhodes looks at how hasty privatization of state-owned telephone companies led to short-term economic windfalls for multinational corporations but long-term instability due to consumer movements or the threat of them. Eventually these governments implemented consumer-friendly regulation as a belated form of damage control. In contrast, governments that privatized through more gradual, democratic processes were able to make credible commitments to their citizens as well as to their multinational investors by including regulatory regimes with consumer protection mechanisms built in. Rhodes illustrates how consumers-previously unacknowledged actors in studies of social movements, market reforms, and democratizations in and beyond Latin America-are indispensable to understanding the political and social implications of these broad global trends.
"This is a significant contribution to the study of social movements and regulatory policymaking in Latin America. It skillfully applies social movement theorizing to uncover a new, politically relevant actor on the Latin American landscape: consumer movements." — Eduardo Silva, coeditor of Organized Business, Economic Change, and Democracy in Latin America
"Sybil Rhodes convincingly demonstrates that consumer groups, a quintessentially 'pluralist' rather than 'corporatist' form of political participation, are an important component of democratic politics in the more industrialized societies of Latin America today." — Leslie Elliott Armijo, editor of Debating the Global Financial Architecture
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
ONE
Consumer Movements: New Social and Political Actors in Latin America
TWO
Explaining the Emergence of Consumer Movements: The "Crossed Wires" Effect of Democratization and Privatization
THREE
Authoritarian Privatization and Delayed Consumer Mobilization in Chile
FOUR
The "Original Sins" of Privatization in Argentina
FIVE
Contentious Consumer Mobilization in Argentina
SIX
The Gradual and Contested Privatization of Brazil’s "Telessauro"
SEVEN
"Post-Jurassic" Regulation and Contained Consumer Response
EIGHT
Democratizing Free-Market Capitalism: Consumers and the Codevelopment of "Voice" and "Exit" in Latin America
Notes
Bibliography
Index