The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has disclosed that CIA collaborators helped plan the economic measures that Chile’s junta enacted immediately after seizing power (‘A Draconian Cure for Chile’s Economic Ills’, Business Week, January 12). Committee witnesses maintain that some of the Chicago boys received CIA funds for such research efforts as a 300-page economic blueprint that was given to military leaders before the coup. It is therefore understandable that after seizing power they were, as The Wall Street Journal (November 2, 1973) put it, champing to be unleashed on the Chilean economy. Their first approach to the situation was gradual; only after a year of relative confusion did they decide to implement without major modification the theoretical model they had been taught at Chicago. The occasion merited a visit to Chile by Mr. Friedman himself who, along with his associate, Professor Harberger, made a series of well-publicized appearances to promote a shock treatment for the Chilean economy – something that Friedman emphatically described as the only medicine. Absolutely. There is no other. There is no other long-term solution. (The quotation is from El Mercurio of Santiago, March 23, 1975.)
Orlando Letelier in The Nation (1976)at TNI. The Chicago Boys in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awful Toll
Deeply involved in the preparation of the 1975 military coup in Chile, the Chicago Boys convinced the Junta generals that they were prepared to supplement the brutality, which the military possessed, with the intellectual assets it lacked.
Letelier was a Chilean economist who was assassinated in a car bombing in Washington DC on September 21, 1976 in an operation directed by Michael Townley. Townley worked for the CIA and was trained by the CIA in manufacturing and deploying car bombs. Orlando Letelier article at Wikipedia.
I looked up the article because of the number of of reviews of Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century I’ve read this week. Several compare its significance to Milton Freidman and Ana Schwartz 1963 tome, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960.
(via protoslacker)