Very well,
The crisis hit everyone but the contexts are different, Argentina and Brazil were industrial nations, others were agrarian and in many cases had a monoculture like coffe, so I cannot talk about all of them, especially since I only have a base on Brazil, but I think that this is enought to explain why there is a difference between the reasons of the many governments crash.
This is the growth of the brazilian debt. From the 1930 revolution until 1964 we had a group of populists that can be called in a very generic way as "National developmentalists", basically Vargas, Juscelino Kubitschek and João Goulart, the three presidents with almost the same mindset. The three kept their former project's going with small differences (Vargas going to build the base industry, JK to consolidate the national bourgeisie and Jango to help to increase the living standart and help the poor). This was stopped brutally by the 1964 coup, that brought the old elite that had lost ower in 1930 to power along with the brazilian right wing liberals and some sectors of the military aligned to a clique called "Superior war school". Juscelino Kubitschek ruled from 1955-60 and kept a five year plan increasing the debt of Brazil to consolidate the industrialization started by Vargas and to consolidate our consumer goods, for the brazilian person to have a brazilian car and a brazilian TV, and thus the debt grow. He planned to come back in 1965 to make a more responsible plan, but he became one of the first victims of the dictatorship being exiled. Now we get into the dictatorship, and to be more precise,
Golbery do Couto e Silva. The coup had two main factions, the Sorbonne, more connected with the farmers of the old republic, more technocratic and more right wing liberal, Pinochetists is you want. They used the economist Roberto Campos to draft their economical plan, the
PAEG, basically a plan of austerity to control the rampant inflation of the populist era, thus decreasing the dissent post coup, and also to control the government debt. I personally desagree with the plan but it was a good plan, just too right wing liberal and anti industrialization,
Roberto Campos became a respected right wing liberal and his legacy lives on... then 1968 happened.
The spread of the 1968 protests to Brazil led to the
March of the 100 thousand, that is considered by many the turning point of the dictatorship (
example), as we were on a right wing dictatorship built on macarthism and they saw people waving flags of the communist party on the demonstration, thus provocking the Sorbornne to lose their hold and to be replaced by the Hardline faction of the army with the dictator Costa e Silva. now the Golbery that I cited above enters the scene: He built two main doctrines used by the dictatorship, the first was a diplomatic one that placed Brazil as a pawn of the USA in South america, according to it the USA should be the hegemon from the top of Nunavut to southern Patagonia and Brazil as a loyal ally should be the southern little neighbour to help the consolidation of this position, that is why we intervened on the 1968 civil war on the DOminican republic, to give a example. The debt problem comes from the second one, on how to apply the repression and how to increase the popularity of the junta.
Recent studies showed that the junta wasn't as popular as people tough, as
Jango had 70% approval before the coup. The austerity plan PAEG and the march of the 100 thousand made this even more possible, so he created a doctrine based on the concept that the political opposition should be eliminated along with economical growth, as a car with his accelerator: When the economy is growing, your popularity increases too, so you must accelerate the repression, "The people will not care if communists are being shot if they can afford a VW beetle", and so they embarked on the "
Brazilian Miracle". I use "Miracle" under quotations because the therm is falling out of use because a miracle is when the economy get a 10% growth for 10 years, and the dictatorship didn't came not even near that except for 1973 when they grew 14%, but a explanation for that comes later. They began to increase the repression to levels unseen in Brazilian history, thus creating a period known as "Years of steel" from 1968 when Costa e Silva became the dictator until 1974 when his sucessor, Médici, left the power. The habeas corpus was suspended, any kind of dissent was crushed, politicians could be replaced at any time and have their personal beings confiscated, people on the house of the thousands dissapeared, of which 424 were confirmed executed. At the same time the GDP grew and we won the 1970 world cup, that is why the dictatorship is so controversial and you got figures like Bolsonaro, for the average citizen who didn't cared about politics he was just getting wealthier while a minority was being crushed to pieces, and so on this field the Golbery theory worked. The growth however didn't came through a healthy and well planned economic plan, instead by two plans, the first and the second National Development Plan led by the right wing statist
Delfim Neto, who openly said that he didn't knew economics at the time he got appointed. He made the growth by contrating the massive loans you can see starting in the mid-late 60s and investing on infraestruture, stadiums, highways, dams, anything, while a lot of the money was of course taken by corruption to fill the junta's pockets. While many people (like my father) commemorated this artificial boom, many already knew that this wasn't sustainable:
This 1974 comic shows a family, the wife reads: "Only this year three billion dollars entered Brazil, the payment begins in ten years." the husband looks at his son and says "Poor..."
They were digging their own graves and the reality came with the oil crash, when the europeans, americans and the IMF stopped pumping money on Brazil the junta collapsed, the Hardline was replaed by the Sorbornne again and on the next ten years under a horrible recession the junta democratized.
So according to this, had the coup not happened or even better, got crushed, Brazil could have suffered from the Debt crisis, but not as bad as OTL.
What do you think?