Are Spanish investments in Latin America safe? Latin American countries have an appreciably modern legal system, inherited from France and Spain, mostly, with great influence from the United States in recent times. They respect, therefore, the right to property and, nevertheless, according to international law, any state can deprive a foreigner of such property, provided certain conditions are met requirements.

Any investment across the seas is a gamble between the prospect of getting rich and the risk of losing everything. Nobody is unaware of the bad reputation of some large Spanish companies in Latin America, caused by a defective service that was detrimental to ordinary citizens. Whether this bad reputation is deserved or whether the bad service is the fault of these companies is beyond the scope of this brief analysis but, nevertheless, it has fueled the populism of recent years, spurred by the disappointment of the little profit obtained from the neoliberal policies advocated by the so-called Washington Consensus of the early nineties, which brought as one of its consequences the wave of privatizations from which some of our country's multinationals benefited. For all these reasons, expropriations (or equivalent measures) in Latin America may be more frequent from now on, because they are popular at home, they appeal to patriotism, and because the prospect of being isolated at the international level does not scare those who, in their own eyes and emboldened by the example of other neighboring countries, have been ignored by international economic organizations (World Bank, IMF, etc.) for some time now. Furthermore, the expropriating rulers must know that, even if the expropriated do not accept the compensation offered to them -whether "fair" or "adequate", which is not the same thing-, the heavy indemnities decreed -probably- by the international courts in four or five years may not be paid for another five years, or perhaps never, in view of the history of the arbitrations against Argentina, motivated by the crisis at the beginning of the century.