Latin America
Related: About this forumThe United States Didn’t Just Help Topple Allende—We Trained the Economists, Too
By Greg Grandin
Source: The Nation
November 24, 2015
Sergio de Castro is among the vilest of the Chicago Boys, Chilean economists who studied at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger and who, after the September 11, 1973, coup, helped impose on their fellow citizens a punishing program of extreme economic austerity. In the film, de Castro recalls climbing a hill in Santiago so he could watch the Air Force bomb La Moneda, the presidential palace where Salvador Allende was soon to die. As flames poured out of the palaces windows, he felt, he says, an infinite happiness. De Castro says he didnt know anyone who had been killed by his government, even though representatives from the World Bank, the IMF, and the US State Department kept complaining about the repression. Asked by Carola Fuentes if he ever brought up those complaints with Pinochet, he said no. De Castro says he feels great pain, not just for the tortured but the torturers but that, knowing what he knows nowthat thousands were killed or disappeared and tens of thousands tortured during his tenurehe still would have served Pinochet. There arent any corrective measures that are painless, de Castro says.
Fuentes and Valdeavellano have dug up terrific home movies of the first class of Chicago Boys, studying and socializing in Hyde Park in the mid-1950s, replete with narrow lapels, thin ties, and endless cigarettes. Friedman, now dead, appears in passing. He was brilliant in his exposition, naïve in his proposals, says Ricardo French-Davis, who took classes with Friedman but broke from the orthodoxy. The documentary nicely reveals how ideological the Chicago Boys were, trained not just in the technical details of monetarism but, as one of them puts it, inculcated with a religious belief in the efficient operation of the totally liberalized markets. They understood their mission in continental terms. They were determined to, Ernesto Fontaine, another original unrepentant Chicago Boy who appears in the documentary, says elsewhere, expand throughout Latin America, confronting the ideological positions which prevented freedom and perpetuated poverty and backwardness.
The exchange program that brought the Chileans to Chicago was funded by public money, from the US governments Point Four foreign-aid program. I dont think there has been a better investment of American taxpayers money, Fontaine says in the film. The program was targeted at weakening Keynesian developmentalism in Latin America, at spreading, as one former University of Chicago president put it, the Chicago influence and market economics throughout Latin America. Considering the dominance of Keynes and Marx in Chile and elsewhere, a number of adjectives could be attached to the program: quixotic in the face of statist hegemony; Gramscian in its success at marching through and transforming the institutions; and Jesuitical in its determination against seemingly long odds.
Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-united-states-didnt-just-help-topple-allende-we-trained-the-economists-too/
forest444
(5,902 posts)A fraud-wracked failure, as former President Piñera knows so well.
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://www.gamba.cl/2012/02/la-historia-del-banco-de-talca-o-como-pinera-se-hizo-millonario-estafando/&prev=search
But down came St. Ronnie to Pinoshit's rescue, with easy refinancing terms for its $19 billion foreign debt (almost equal to Chile's GDP at the time), and the granting of most favored nation trading status - such that when he left in 1990 things had dramatically improved.
Not that his people benefited much, as he left with 68% poverty despite the uptick in the late 1980s (it's 14.4% now, thanks to Michelle Bachelet and other center-left Concertación administrations).
longship
(40,416 posts)One of the best reads ever. When I first read it, I flipped back to the first page and read it again.
Naomi Klein
The Shock Doctrine
Essential reading.
Judi Lynn
(160,631 posts)Everyone's already seen what they do to a country, what they do to every country they rape.
Some of the ones who remember die off, then they rush the gates all over again.
Greg Grandin chose exactly the word to cover this guy: vile.
He actually approves of the torture, the suffering by the leftists, the hideous sadistic murders. I hope in our lifetime the world will finally let him know what human beings think of him.