The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

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. 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. Under the program, there were forty to fifty Latin Americans studying graduate-level economics at any given time—roughly one-third of the department’s total student population. In comparable programs at Harvard or MIT, there were just four or five Latin Americans. It was a startling achievement: in just a decade, the ultraconservative University of Chicago had become the premier destination for Latin Americans wanting to study economics abroad, a fact that would shape the course of the region’s history for decades to come.