Chile’s CIA-backed coup installed economists who imposed austerity suppressing working-class alternatives

Evidence

The most jarring example is Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile, ushered in by the bombing of the Palacio de la Moneda on September 11, 1973, to overthrow Salvador Allende, the elected socialist president, who was enabling large-scale redistribution in favor of the working class through the nationalization of key industries previously in the hands of international investors, and land reform that expropriated large estate owners (or latifundistas) in favor of landless peasants. The coup, backed by the CIA, paved the way for the “Chicago Boys”—a group of Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago by neoclassical economists Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger—to implement their aggressive austerity plan, El Ladrillo (The Brick). This plan privatized the pension system and the bulk of state-owned companies (including banks, utilities, and industries), attacked unions and other labor protections, slashed social expenditures, cut taxes on the wealthy, and increased interest rates. El Ladrillo suppressed the Chilean alternative to capitalism and reduced half the population to poverty. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 356

Categorization

• XREF: The Chile case connects directly to the El Ladrillo/Brick plan and Chicago Boys — key material for the reader’s cross-case reconstruction. — connects to: The CIA-backed coup installed Chicago-school austerity economists in Chile — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 356; ECLA made Santiago the ideological counterweight hub against neoliberal economics — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1547; Chicago-trained economists were placed throughout the Chilean state before the 1973 coup. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1552 (+1 more)
• SEED: The coincidence of date — September 11, 1973 bombing of La Moneda — offers an essay angle on the irony of the shared date with the more famous 9/11.