On International Transaction Law: Current Trends and Challenges from a Latin America Perspective

During the last decade of the twentieth century, international transactions that involve the movement of capital throughout the world achieved unprecedented frequency of usage. The consequences of this were felt at international and national levels. On the international level there was a creation of a great amount of Bilateral Investment treaties (BIT) between states that regulate and provide substantive norms as well as dispute resolution mechanism that bring out enormous numbers of unarticulated arbitral decisions. On the national level, many states modified national legislation to attract foreign investment. These modifications created a complex system that regulates international transactions. However, during the last years there have been two trends in investment among developing countries: one that supports the current legal framework, and another that seeks to find a new ordering of the field. The present article will explore these trends from the Latin America experience by analyzing how this law evolved in the region by studying the structure of the investment regulation of the main integration processes, and finally, by formulating a new understanding of the way that this type of law should be interpreted while dealing with sensible issues.