Hernández, Miguel Reyes, and Miguel Alejandro López López. “Dependency Theory in Latin American History.” Latin American Studies, 2019.

Miguel Reyes Hernández documents the multiple opposing and supporting arguments regarding the dependency theory. There are numerous schools of thought regarding the causes of the dependency and where to assign blame, however a majority of scholars have the same ideas of which countries have suffered from dependency. The theory of dependency relies on ideals of the center-periphery model. A center-periphery model includes a capitalist dominating state and its subordinate less developed state(s). Economic centers use military power and political power in order to extract surplus from the periphery states, in time this force will lead to nations being underdeveloped. Latin America is the place where dependency had its origins and where it is most predominant. 

Hernández was born in Mexico and has an economic background, he currently teaches economic classes at Universidad Iberoamericana. His economic academia gives context to his opinion that dependency theory is an economic phenomenon. The division between the critics that deny dependency theory is real and those who agree with the author is most commonly based on the division of North Americans and Latin Americans. North Americans generally believe that dependency theory is something that happens as a byproduct of global relations, South Americans usually place more blame on the imperialist nations. 

The intervention of the United States and Europe has been shown to be a hinderance to the social and economic development of Latin American states. Laws are passed that either intentionally or coincidentally hurt dependent Latin American states again and again. These include trade laws. For example the Marshall Plan created a relationship between US farmers and Europe that negatively impacted Argentina because of its dependence on exporting agricultural commodities to Europe. While the Marshall Plan was mainly intended to help Europe recover from World War II while bringing more business to the American farmers it also had a second intention. Without the exportation of goods to Europe, Argentina’s Peronist movement failed, which was not-so-coincidentally opposed by the United States.