This paper attempts to advance the analysis of Eastern Europe's ongoing debt accumulation process by comparing it to the debt accumulation press that preceded the Latin American debt crisis of the early 1980s. The authors report on key country and international conditions in both situations and place Eastern Europe in the quantitative context of the Latin-American crisis-in-the-making of the late 1970s and early 1980s. This allows for the identification of some reassuring, as well as some worrisome, trends and for the drawing of some broad sustainability-related conclusions.