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mammon
on Wed 07 Nov 2007 08:00 AM AKST |
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The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, Edited Excerpts
The goal of the Chile Project was to produce ideological warriors who would win the battle of ideas against Latin America’s “pink” economists. Officially launched in 1956, the project saw one hundred Chilean students pursue advanced degrees at the University of Chicago between 1957 and 1970, their tuition and expenses paid for by U.S. taxpayers and U.S. foundations. The central purpose of the project was to train a generation of students who would become the intellectual leaders in economic affairs in Chile, a form of intellectual imperialism. In 1965, the program was expanded to include students from across Latin America, with particularly heavy participation from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. The expansion was funded through a grant from the Ford Foundation and led to the creation of the Center for Latin American Economic Studies at the University of Chicago which churned out hundreds of Latino Chicago Boys.
When the first group of Chileans returned home from Chicago, they took up posts as economics professors in the Catholic University Economics Department, rapidly turning it into their own little Chicago School in the middle of Santiago. The students who went through the program became known throughout the region as “The Chicago Boys.” But the Chicago Boys weren’t leading their countries anywhere – in fact, they were being left behind. By Chiles’ historic 1970 elections, the country had moved so far left that all three major political parties were in favor of nationalizing the country’s largest source of revenue: the copper mines then controlled by U.S. mining giants.
It was Nixon who would give the Chicago Boys and their professors something they had long dreamed of: a chance to prove that their capitalist utopia was more than a theory in a basement workshop – a shot at remaking a country from scratch. Democracy had been inhospitable to the Chicago Boys in Chile; dictatorship would prove an easier fit. When Nixon heard that Allende had been elected president, he famously ordered the CIA director, Richard Helms, to “make the economy scream.”
