LIMA -- The construction industry here in Lima is booming, middle-class residents are once again snapping up new apartments in Rio de Janeiro and software companies in Santiago, Chile, are expanding.

A year after the global financial crisis exploded, most Latin American countries are putting the tough times in the rearview mirror during the final three months of 2009. Brazil, the region's giant and the world's ninth largest economy, is leading the way, along with such other market-friendly countries as Peru, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay and Panama.

But a rising tide is not lifting all boats. The slow economic recovery in the United States is holding back Mexico and most Central American nations, with drug violence and swine flu also battering Mexico.

Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Argentina are lagging -- in part because their leftist populist leaders have scared away investors and unsettled consumers with policies that have included nationalizing companies or private assets.

Despite the fledgling signs of recovery, the World Bank reports the net losers include the eight million Latin Americans who have been forced into poverty and the other five million who would have left poverty but for the difficult economic times. Overall, about 560 million people live in Latin America and 180 million of them were below the poverty line at the beginning of 2009, the World Bank says.

Strategies on how businesses and countries should tackle emerging challenges while maintaining political stability in the wake of the global financial crisis will be prime topics of

discussion at this week's 13th annual Americas Conference at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. The Miami Herald -- along with Florida International University, the World Bank and the state of Florida -- is sponsoring the event this Tuesday and Wednesday.

Meanwhile, it's worth remembering that the global economic crash ended Latin America's five best years since the 1950s.

Before the crisis hit, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, a Santiago-based United Nations Agency, expected Latin America to grow by 4 percent in 2009. Now it projects a 2 percent contraction.

Indicating its faith in a turnaround, however, the group is now forecasting a 3.1 percent growth rate in 2010 for Latin America.

As economists survey the past year and look ahead, they can't help but marvel at how Latin American countries, after years of being lectured to get their fiscal houses in order, mostly managed to swerve around the global economic pileup precisely because they followed that advice.

With exceptions in a couple countries, ``there were no bank runs, no inflation spikes, no capital flight, no large devaluation, no big migration,'' said Marcelo Giugale, an economist who specializes in Latin America at the World Bank. ``You didn't see the traditional symptoms of crisis'' that sank the region's economies previously.

Jay Bryson, a global economist for Wells Fargo Securities in Charlotte, N.C., pinpointed a major reason: ``Latin American countries didn't get all leveraged up like the United States and Europe. You don't have households massively in debt.''

Bryson and other economists said that most Latin American countries saved money, found new export markets and kept inflation low during the good years. This left them better prepared for the downturn.