The peculiar politics of antitrust in Latin America

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

In the context of the Comparative Politics Seminar Series, this session features a presentation by Ben Ross Schneider, Ford International Professor of Political Science Director (MIT Chile Program).

Policy change and institution building in antitrust in Latin America raise two main questions.

First, how, in the space of only a decade (2006-2016), did 3 of the richest and largest countries – Brazil, Chile, and Mexico – build the strongest antitrust agencies and policies in the region? The answers lie mostly in international dissemination of law and best practices backed by foreign governments and firms.

Second, how did big business fight back to reduce the power of these agencies? The answers here depend heavily on the varying political openings or vulnerabilities that allowed individual businesses to contest agency decisions or weaken agencies overall. These vulnerabilities arose mostly in the judiciary in Mexico and through electoral laws and campaign finance in Brazil. The political system in Chile had fewer such vulnerabilities.