The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets

by Jason Hickel

In 1965, with the aid of weapons and intelligence from the United States, Suharto hunted down and killed between 500,000 and 1 million of Sukarno’s supporters in one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century. By 1967, Sukarno’s base had been either eliminated or intimidated into submission, and Suharto took control of the country. His military regime – which ruled until 1998 – was open to Western corporate interests. Time magazine famously described the political transformation of the 1960s as ‘The West’s best news for years in Asia’. Suharto’s regime relied for its economic policies on a group of Indonesian economists who had been trained at the University of California, Berkeley, with funding from the Ford Foundation. Known as the Berkeley Mafia, they worked closely with Suharto to liberalise the economy and eliminate the last vestiges of developmentalism in the country.