The democratic transitions of the 1980s occurred in the context of a profound economic crisis: the foreign debt crisis, which caused a recession so great that those years were called the "lost decade" of Latin America. The interpretation of this crisis as an indicator of the ineffectiveness of authoritarian governments pushed the democratization of the region. During transitions, political scientists were torn mobile phone number list between two fears. There were those who thought that the young democracies would not survive the poverty and inequality they inherited because their fiscal crises would not allow them to attend to the demands of the excluded majorities who then gained the right to express themselves politically. And on the other hand,two. The democratic awakening did not bring redistribution mobile phone number list for the majorities who won political rights, but processes of economic adjustment mobile phone number list and a wave of market reforms that seemed inevitable when the fall of the Berlin Wall heralded the end of the communist utopia. The economic elites lost their fear of democracy, and although the military resisted attempts to prosecute their crimes against human rights, social peace was maintained, either for fear of past repression or because of the wear and tear implied by the economic survival, with the increase in poverty and informality that the 1990s brought. When the political elites seemed to mobile phone number list agree on what was called the Washington Consensus (reforms that included privatizations, deregulation and trade liberalization),xx . Although discontent spilled over into the streets, as during the Caracazo in Venezuela or the so-called gas and water "wars" in Bolivia, it was mostly expressed using the political channels opened up by democracy; that is, with the abandonment of the parties that promoted market policies and the search for other alternatives.