Chicago Boys

There's still gunfire in the streets of Santiago, but these guys, what are they doing? They're printing a five-hundred-page blueprint for the economy, how they are going to undo all of Allende's economic policies and how they're going to remake the Chilean economy along the lines of these radical free market ideas.

They get the name Chicago Boys because most of these people had done their undergraduate degree in economics at the Catholic University of Chile, and then they did a postgraduate degree at the University of Chicago.

They studied with Milton Friedman and other famous economists of that day, and then they go back to Chile, and they have enormous cachet in that world.

The Chicago Boys.

So they were ready, and they deliver, it's called El Ladrillo, The Brick, this five-hundred-page volume, bright and early the next day to all the generals.

So that's the economic side.

I, I have to tell you, my brothers are those people that studied at the university.

[laughs]

So, yeah.

So, what happened after with all the reforms with Pinochet taking over? I mean, the biggest thing we talk about are the Chicago boys with their economic plans, privatizing the social security system.

Certainly, we can credit some Milton Friedman was a part of it, of course.

Some people say, oh, it's so terrible they privatized Social Security, but you know how that goes.

This time was the beginning for the Chilean miracle with the Cowboys.

Wow, it's amazing.

I remember, 10 years ago in Chile, in the Center of History of Libertad y Desarrollo, the Chicago Boys helped with the Austrian school ideas, helped for this country.

Because my country was the most poor country in Latin America.

His theories on economics were all wrong because he was a shield for the a vampire capitalist or i call it vulture capitalism

you know um mr mr uh uh he went ahead and destroyed the economies of chile and many uh central american economies he destroyed the economies in in in the east i mean uh there's a author uh something uh something capitalism she wrote from canada i can't remember her name right now she wrote an excellent book that I was wedded to for a very long time on what Milton Friedman did throughout the world with the Chicago Boys.

It is a mess.

But continue, my brother.

The second one here is related, and that is, to what extent were communists, but also some social democrats, liberals, social movements, indigenous and feminist social movements, racialized, to fit this regenerative fascist or quasi-fascist project in Spain, this moment where Spain and its regime were in kind of terminal decline.

And the kind of background to this question, of course, is that The Spanish Civil War framework is playing out alongside or during a neoliberal model a la the Chicago Boys and a neoconservative model also a la the kind of U.S. positioning of Jean Kirkpatrick.

dividing some governments along either authoritarian or totalitarian designation so as to figure out when exactly you're going to intervene.

So different dimensions there.

It also happened in Guatemala.

It also happened in El Salvador.

And so there are a variety of ways in which these practices that were established by the Franco dictatorship, and which the dictatorship attempted quite explicitly, not always successfully, but had organizations and a kind of bureaucratic apparatus to try and export to Latin America through the 40s and 50s and 60s, we see that those seeds took root, right? Then on the economic question, right, and the sort of neoliberalism, Chicago Boys, as you mentioned, sort of that whole piece of things, there's a great new book by a historian named Daniel Kressel called Hispanic Technocracy.

And what it looks at is how Franco's Spain Onganía's Argentina, so the dictatorship, one of the dictatorships immediately before the 1976 junta, that is the one that most people are familiar with, but the Onganía dictatorship from 66 to 70, which was explicitly Francoist, and then Chile under Pinochet, how they basically, how in those three societies, regimes that originated very much out of a kind of Hispanist, corporatist economic model or set of ideas transformed themselves into early versions of neoliberalism.

James Buchanan, a whole host of folks, a lot of whom came out of the University of Chicago Economics Department.

And a lot of their people who followed their message were called the Chicago Boys.

And people who really gravitated from the political world included Barry Goldwater, the presidential candidate in 1964.

He had a huge loss.

But if you get big by buying up other companies, buying up competitors, trying to interfere with keeping a free market going, that's a role for public policy.

And that's how it worked until the 1970s.

And then the neoliberal Chicago boys came along.

They had been working on this idea since the 1950s.