EVERYTHING looked much better in Latin America in 1995. True, Gen Augusto Pinochet, the man who had brought bloodshed and butchery to Chile in 1973, was still in power. But he was merely commander-in-chief and no longer dictator of the nation. That was ostensibly ruled by Eduardo Frei, the mild-mannered Christian Democrat engineer whose father had been president from 1964 until he passed the sash of office to Dr Salvador Allende in 1973.
Brazil, the region's largest country, came to be ruled by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the Vaclav Havel of the Southern Hemisphere, a man who set a fine example of brave intellectual opposition to the military regime which took over in 1964.
Central America was no longer at the mercy of the foreign meddlers and of the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua and the Salvadorean army's death squads they patronised and financed. Mexico, where a guerrilla band named after the revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata had captured the headlines when it launched an insurrection in the poor southern state of Chiapas two years ago, seemed economically wobbly but politically no worse than usual.
The Zapatistas, who captured the world's attention as they rose in revolt on New Year's Day 1994, the first day Mexico joined the United States and Canada in the North American Free Trade Association, failed to persuade anyone else in the country to follow them along the path of the armed struggle.
Even Haiti seemed to calm down under Jean-Bertrand Aristide, formerly a Salesian priest, held under tight control by Washington lest he do too much to frighten foreign investors after resuming the presidency interrupted by a period of military rule.
Apart from Haiti, the region seemed in danger of slipping off the pages of European newspapers. Nevertheless, a lot of unobtrusive economic activity was meanwhile going on which seems sure to affect the region to a much greater extent than any one national leader or movement. The global market was making its presence felt in a way which spelled the end for those industrialists who had for decades tried to manufacture behind high tariff walls, asking the consumer to pay extra for locally-produced goods for the sake of living in a country with its own steel works or car manufacturing plant.
The North American Free Trade Area had a year of quiet flirtation with Chile, the most dynamic economy in Latin America, without any union being consummated, as people wondered what new name NAFTA would have to assume when it eventually gained its first member whose coasts looked out onto the South Pacific Ocean.
The back-room economists came into their own only in the last month of 1995 when the presidents of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, the four members of the Mercosur economic alliance, turned upon the eve of the EU summit in Madrid to sign a new trade deal.
UNDERLINING the fact that the Europeans were a long way from cutting their links with, Latin America and abandoning South America in what Uncle Sam had long regarded as his yard, Felipe Gonzalez, the Spanish minister, reminded those who heard his press conference that the EU was the biggest trading partner and the biggest foreign investor in Mercosur. He added that the EU would also be strengthening its links with Cuba. The far-right anti-Castro lobbies in Miami, which since the Cuban revolution have twisted governments in Washington round their little finger, were shown to have no such power with the governments of the EU.
And Gonzalez said it all with the evident satisfaction of the leader of a country which a century ago lost its last foreign war and Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the remains of a once great empire, in a hopeless struggle with the United States.
But what did a year without too many political shocks and a good deal of economic planning do for the Latin American peasant or slum dweller?
The answer, according to Gert Rosenthal, the head of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, is - not very much. For four decades until the end of the 1980s, growth was around five per cent a year. Today, it is down to 3.5 per cent or less. Though he was too canny to name the leaders responsible, he made it clear that the wave of neo-liberalism which swept out of the White House of Ronald Reagan and George Bush and out of the Downing Street of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s continued to wash away the none too solid fundaments of Latin American society.
"In the process of redefining the frontier between government and private activity, many times the supply of social services was neglected," Rosenthal commented, singling out for special criticism Latin American governments' lack of proper investment in education and health. That," he said, "limits the outlook of the region's poorer people."
Not for the first time in Latin America, and probably not for the last, the sacrifices were being made by those who could least afford it.