Being arguably the most iconic American product, Coca-Cola has come to symbolize American capitalism, and what is good and bad about it. For some, like dissident youths in the former Soviet Union, Coca-Cola was a symbol of freedom - personal, economic and political. For others, like the left in India until the 1980s, it epitomized what is wrong with American capitalism - consumerism and, worse, commercial manipulation of consumer taste. In 1977, in a highly symbolic move, the Indian government cancelled the licence for Coca-Cola to operate in the country when the company refused to go into a joint venture with a local partner. Equally symbolically, the company came back to India in 1993, soon after its economic liberalization in 1991. Few food items have been laden with so much political symbolism on a global scale as Coca-Cola. One person who deftly negotiated the symbolic minefield that is Coca-Cola is Marshal Georgi Zhukov, who masterminded the Soviet victories over the Nazis in the crucial Second World War battles of Leningrad and Stalingrad. He is said to have been introduced to the drink by the American general (later president) Dwight Eisenhower during the war and fallen in love with it. While he was serving as the commander of the Soviet occupation forces in Europe (May 1945-June 1946), he made a special request to the Coca-Cola company to manufacture a clear version of the drink, so that he could have it without being seen to be imbibing the essence of American capitalism. The white version, which was created by taking out the caramel colouring, was produced in Brussels, put in a nondescript bottle and shipped to the Marshal's European headquarters. A brilliant manoeuvre worthy of one of the greatest military strategists in history.

Upon becoming president, Morales nationalized the natural gas industry, the country's main export industry. He then went on to (at least partially) nationalize the 'utilities' (electricity, water and railways), raised the royalties that (mostly foreign) mining companies paid to the government (as the guardian of the national mineral wealth) and increased social welfare spending. Many economists predicted his changes would lead to a dire economic disaster - nationalized industries, hostile policies towards foreign investors and 'downward' income redistribution being the worst things that a government can do for the economy, according to the Washington Consensus. But Bolivia's performance defied the sceptics. Given Morales's policies, it was natural that the country saw a dramatic fall in income inequality during his term. But the country's economic growth also accelerated markedly - the growth rate of its per capita income rose from 0.5% per year during the period of Washington Consensus (1982-2005) to 3% per year during the Morales era. Bolivia isn't the only country in Latin America that has defied the Washington Consensus and improved its economic performance. Between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s, leftwing or left-leaning parties came to power in several Latin American countries - Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela - in what is known as the Pink Tide. None of them went as far as Bolivia, but the Pink Tide governments rolled back many of the neo-liberal policies of the Washington Consensus. They increased welfare spending for the poor, while some of them increased minimum wages and strengthened trade unions, thereby increasing the share of national income going to workers. Some of them also partially reversed trade liberalization, increased subsidies to selected industries and toughened regulations on foreign investors.

The most significant in this regard is the victory of Gabriel Boric, a thirty-five-year-old former student activist, representing Frente Amplio, or the Broad Front, that is, the coalition of left wing parties, in the Chilean presidential election of December 2021. Since the military coup in 1973, Chile had been the trailblazer for neoliberalism not just in Latin America but in the world, even anticipating the neo-liberal policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. So when Chile elected Boric as the president, who had declared that Chile was the birthplace of neoliberalism, and it shall also be its grave, it was as if Americans had voted to ban Coca-Cola. The rejection of the neo-liberal Washington Consensus policies has been less visible in other parts of the developing world, such as Asia and Africa. In Asia, it was mainly because the countries in the region had not followed the Washington Consensus policies in the first place as rigidly as did the Latin American countries. Their generally good economic performance has meant that relatively few Asian countries have had to borrow heavily from the Washington institutions, making it less necessary for them to adopt neo-liberal policies. Moreover, many Asian countries have had a less ideological approach to economic policies, so, even when they adopted neo-liberal policies, those policies were usually not implemented in their extreme forms, as they were in Latin America.

Neo-liberal policies have not worked well even in the rich countries. During the neo-liberal period since the 1980s, these countries have had slower growth, higher inequality and more frequent financial crises than they had in the preceding decades of the 'mixed economy', in which the government played a more active - that is, more intrusive, from the neo-liberal point of view - role in restraining and regulating market forces. However, neo-liberal policies have been positively disastrous for developing countries because they were particularly unsuited to their needs. Above all, the neo-liberal orthodoxy denied the fact that developing countries can develop their economies only if they can create the 'space' for their producers to 'grow up' and acquire the capabilities to engage in higher-productivity industries through trade protection, subsidies, regulation of foreign investors and other supportive government measures. To make it worse, especially in the 1980s and the 1990s, the Washington institutions' policy recommendations took what came to be derogatorily known as a 'cookie cutter' approach, in which the same set of policies was recommended to all countries, regardless of the differences in their economic conditions and socio-political environments.