Varieties of Housing Financialization in Latin America: A Comparative Analysis Between Chile and Venezuela (2000-2015)

In recent decades, Latin America has shown the impacts and effects of the process of housing financialization. This phenomenon, however, has not been homogeneous, as its development has been determined by the political and corporate trajectories that financial capitalism has undertaken in each region. In line with this observation, this article proposes a comparative analysis of the situations in Chile and Venezuela. These countries have represented distinctive models of development: while Chile adheres to neoliberal policies, Venezuela embraces the socialism of the Bolivarian Revolution. In order to carry out this analysis, a comparative methodology was proposed based on diverse axes of analysis. The results reveal the trajectories and models of financial capitalism developed in Chile and Venezuela. It is concluded that both countries present different levels of integration to the dynamics of housing financialization: Chile evinces an advanced insertion, whilst Venezuela exhibits a limited integration to this process. The latter country, like an important number of cases in the region, would express the varieties of financialization present in Latin America, enabling a broader discussion about the characteristics that this process would assume in this geography of the Global South