A League of Nations report singled out three countries as the most devastated: Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. Chile topped the list. Between 1929 and 1932, Chilean exports collapsed from 279 million dollars to 35 million - roughly a sixth of pre-crash levels. Imports fell from 197 million to 26 million. Foreign loans, the lifeblood of Chilean growth, dropped from 338 million in 1929 to just 23 million by 1932. Real GDP fell by a third. In the nitrate fields of the Atacama, 50,000 miners lost their jobs in the sector alone. Between September 1930 and February 1931, more than 46,000 people abandoned the nitrate camps for Santiago and other cities, hauling what they could carry, looking for any work at all.

Peru's exports fell seventy-two percent in three years - from 132 million dollars in 1929 to 38 million in 1932. The country had built its public finances on American loans, and when those loans stopped flowing in March 1931, Peru suspended payments on its foreign debt. Sugar fields shed workers. Mining operations cut their blue-collar workforce nearly in half. White-collar mining employment fell from 3,000 to 1,000. But Peru's wounds healed faster than Chile's. By 1937, exports of cotton, lead, and zinc had returned to 1929 levels. The Depression had been brutal, but not permanent.

Mexico should have been hit hardest by its proximity to the American collapse. Instead, something unexpected happened. Exports made up only twelve percent of Mexican GDP, compared to thirty percent in Chile. When global trade froze, Mexican factories kept turning. Silver exports actually rose thanks to the American Silver Purchase Act of 1934. A new oil field at Poza Rica pushed production from 33 million barrels in 1932 to 40 million by 1935. With imports cut in half, Mexicans started buying Mexican goods. Economists call this import substitution. Mexicans called it survival, and it built the industrial base that would define the country for decades.

Cuba's economy was sugar, and sugar was in collapse. Prices fell from 2.96 cents per pound in 1929 to 1.47 cents within a few years - roughly half. By 1933, only 125 sugar mills remained active, down from 163 in 1929. The British embassy in Havana documented the cost in human terms: the average Cuban sugar worker earned 25 cents for a ten to eleven hour day. National income had fallen from 708 million pesos in 1925 to 294 million by 1933. Tourism revenue, which had been 26 million dollars before the crash, fell below 5 million. President Gerardo Machado's dictatorship could not absorb the pressure. On August 12, 1933, he resigned and fled the country.

The Depression did more than empty warehouses and shutter mills. It reshaped who governed. In Brazil, Getúlio Vargas came to power in 1930 and held it until 1945, riding nationalist sentiment into a regime that borrowed openly from European fascism. Argentina shifted economic policy repeatedly as it scrambled for recovery. In Chile, President Juan Esteban Montero ordered the printing of 152 million pesos in April 1932 to fund public works and unemployment relief - a desperate measure that reflected how fragile the political center had become. Haiti gained a kind of accidental freedom: the United States ended its military occupation in 1934, partly because Washington could no longer justify the expense. Across the continent, the old arrangement - export raw materials, borrow American money, trust the system - had broken. What replaced it was messier, more nationalist, and in some places, far more dangerous.