This article discusses the basic features of monetarist thinking, stressing the differences between their application to advanced capitalist countries and the semi‐industrialised Latin American economies. The experience of Brazil—a rather heretic application of monetarist thinking since 1967—seems till 1980 to have obtained the most impressive results, particularly in terms of growth. The dogmatic application of monetarism in Argentina and Chile since the mid‐1970s has yielded rather unsatisfactory results; recent developments (particularly in their increasingly vulnerable balance of payments situation) seem to point to a crisis in Southern Cone monetarism.