De Soto marketed property titling as an anti-terrorist alternative to Maoist revolution.

Evidence

There is a further way in which the political implementation of the titling program affected the sequence in which cities and neighborhoods entered into it. De Soto described the regularization of property rights as El otro sendero, “The Other Path”—or as his book’s subtitle explained, “the economic answer to terrorism.” The reference was to the Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, the Maoist revolutionary movement that in the 1980s controlled large areas of the central Andean highlands of Peru. The populism of de Soto’s neoliberal program, emphasizing the virtues of property rights for the poor, was intended as an answer to the more radical property redistribution programs of the revolutionaries—as well as to the problems of large-scale urban migration caused by years of warfare in the countryside between the rebels and the Peruvian armed forces. The war against the Sendero Luminoso and its effect on one particular city shaped both the property rights experiment and the research experiment to which it gave rise. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1966

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that El otro sendero explicitly positioned property formalization as the counterrevolutionary answer to the Shining Path’s Maoist redistributions.
• XREF: Links to the wider historiography of Cold War-era development policy deployed as counterinsurgency — parallels the Montgomery/Milne work on development as warfare. — connects to: De Soto’s property-titling institute was attacked by Sendero Luminoso. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2005

Broader Connections

• De Soto’s property-titling institute was attacked by Sendero Luminoso. #complicates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2005