The Washington Consensus is a set of ten economic policies that were proposed to be how developing countries were going to recover from their economic crisis.

With the implementation of the Washington Consensus into Latin American countries we have seen mixed results from Brazil , Chile, and Mexico with the large economic picture being stable but overall economic growth being disappointing.

Overall the Washington Consensus while yes was a failure, not all the ideas born from or through this document were. The Washington Consensus at its core, "hold enduring messages"(Birdsall). Open trade and open capital flows aren't themselves bad and have been shown to be successful just not in Latin America because of its specific situation it was in at the time. On the other hand the structural adjustment loans were a horrible misstep and have been proven by studies to be failures. A main reason why the Washington Consensus failed was because of IMF and the World Bank and how they made Latin America a place easy to sell their expensive goods to and not allowing Latin America to export anything thus not being able to generate any revenue causing their money to devalue, crush their economy, and send them into a crisis. The world bank in their reform looked back and were clear about the importance of staying on the lookout for the, "best practices"(Rodrik) and understanding, "there is no unique universal set of rules."(Rodrik).

Neoliberalism is a political approach that often favors free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending.

In the 1980's many Latin American governments adopted neoliberal policies. Chile being one of the first Latin American countries to integrate some of these neoliberal policies. Chile was in a massive economic crisis following a period seeing large amounts of unrest and tension socially and politically as well as pressure from larger countries like the US. With all of this the government was overthrown and many of these new policies were introduced. These policies seemed to fix the economic crisis but stemmed other problems along the way such as decreased wages which led to a widening of inequality. We see neoliberalism seem very appealing for countries because, "it provides a system for re-entrenching class power"(Shaw), but the, "redistribution of wealth"(Shaw), may not be as enticing as it seems due to this shift and spacing of the gap of wealth in society. Eventually with the economy rapidly increasing it came crashing down causing a recession. The recession had many people blaming the policies and other causes such as the already huge debt crisis in Latin America at the time. After the recession Chile had a huge boom and just like that many praised the policies as well as the new ones that had been set in place calling this turn around a "miracle". Chile is a country that with the neoliberal policies set in place experienced both the all time highs and success of these political beliefs as well as the all time lows and struggles that can come with it. As of today Chile has recently had a vote pass supporting the rewriting of the constitution from that era which has many neoliberal policies within it. With too many variables and factors that could have been the cause of positive or negative change within the country many people are left undecided as to whether they are truly bad policies or ideas.