Gold, Oil and Avocados: A Recent History of Latin America in Sixteen Commodities by Andy Robinson

Author:Andy Robinson [Robinson, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Latin America, General, political science, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Business & Economics, Environmental Economics
ISBN: 9781612199351
Google: oSk5EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2021-08-17T23:40:35.578521+00:00

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After witnessing those depressing anti-Dilma protests where half a million Neymar jersey-clad Brazilians marched down the Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, convinced that privatization and deregulation would erase the evils of the Lula years, my visit to Santiago de Chile in November 2019 was a breath of fresh air.

Tens of thousands of Chileans, most of them in their twenties but with the obvious support of their parents, rallied every evening in the Plaza de Italia in the center of the Chilean capital to express their rejection of the oligarchically monopolized free-market economy and call for a political U-turn or even Pîñera’s resignation.

In Chile, people understood how it felt to be the guinea pig in Latin America’s most celebrated neoliberal laboratory. The economy had had its praises sung so many times in The Wall Street Journal that there was no need even to pay for the advertorial. At investor roundtables, the admirers of Chile who were least troubled by the nightmarish past located the origins of the Chilean miracle precisely in Pinochet’s September 1973 coup. From that ominous date on, the infamous Chicago Boys, inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, had applied their economic shock therapy while Pinochet’s infamous DINA intelligence agency discharged its own less metaphorical shocks in the torture chambers.

Friedman’s address before the military junta in March 1975 would lay out the basis for years, decades, of economic torture in Latin America and beyond at the hands of the IMF, whose latest example was peripheral Europe, especially Greece. Delivered under the name “Gradualism versus Shock Treatment,” the speech included the unforgettable line “there is no sense in cutting a dog’s tail off by inches,” a metaphor that must have pleased the gathered generals. (Forty-six years later I attended an IMF event in Riga during the euro crisis at which the Latvian finance minister repeated verbatim Friedman’s advice to hack the tail from the dog, while Lagarde described the Baltic country’s implementation of the fund’s shock therapy as a “tour de force” with Latvia “showing the way”; wages had fallen by 30 percent, poverty had risen to 40 percent, and 10 percent of the population had migrated.)

Chile was the forerunner of the Friedman approach. It would later inspire Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Boris Yeltsin, but Pinochet had premiered the new neoliberal model of shock therapy, deregulation, privatization, dismantlement of state pensions, health, and education, and generally a shrinking state (with the exception of the bloated military budget), which would soon become fashionable worldwide.

I had the opportunity of interviewing Friedman in 2002, four years before his death, when he was vacationing at his summer home in a gated community for the leisurely retired in Florida. “They did very well!” he said, in reference to Sergio de Castro and the other Chilean Chicago Boys who had studied under his tutelage at the University of Chicago. “But they didn’t need a dictatorship to do it.” A convenient lapse of memory, at his ninety years of age, had allowed

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