Latin America feels the pinch of global economic crisis

A galloping sense of insecurity has replaced the swaggering confidence that insatiable demand would keep prices up for products such as soybeans, copper, wheat and coffee. But commodities have tumbled in value in the wake of the financial meltdown.

Some even fear that Latin America's most prolonged growth spurt in years could be over, ushering in an era of renewed austerity.

"We're sailing without a compass," said Nilson Wirth Monteiro, a consultant with Link Investments in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the epicenter of Latin America's largest economy. "There's no compass to indicate how commodities and global markets will behave."

Leaders such as Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva initially boasted that their nations were inoculated against the "jazz effect" -- as Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner mockingly dubbed the spreading crisis in an address at the United Nations.

But that early sense of insouciance has largely vanished. Credit has become extremely tight and earnings from commodity exports are tanking. Regional stock markets have followed Wall Street's nose-dive. Central banks from Mexico City to Santiago, Chile, have disbursed cash to bolster suddenly shaky currencies

Argentina, one of the world's leading producers of soybeans, corn and wheat, could lose as much as $6 billion next year in agricultural exports, according to one estimate. Many governments, including Brazil's, may have to rethink ambitious plans meant to improve infrastructure and reduce poverty.

"Latin American leaders have in a few days gone from preoccupation with the phenomenon happening elsewhere in the world to abject fear," noted the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, in a report released Friday. "There is a growing nervousness that once again Latin America cannot escape the consequences of the globalized financial connections that run through the United States."

With prices down from record highs, alarmed farmers who covered vast tracts of pampas and rain forest in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia with soybeans are wondering whether the boom has turned to bust. Anxiety has replaced the rural bluster.