The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets

by Jason Hickel

the US government launched Project Chile in 1956. The goal was to resist developmentalism by training Chilean economics students – around 100 of them – in the principles of neoliberal theory at the University of Chicago. A decade later, the programme was expanded to include students from across the continent, and eventually led to the formation of the Center for Latin American Economic Studies at Chicago. It was ideological warfare. The idea was to train students to scorn social safety nets, trade barriers, infant industry protection, price controls, public services and many of the other policies being promoted by progressive Latin American economists at the time. Juan Gabriel Valdés, a Chilean minister during the 1990s, has described this operation as ‘a striking example of an organized transfer of ideology from the United States to a country within its direct sphere of influence’. Interestingly, this project was conceived under the Point Four programme inaugurated by Truman, and was conducted by the US International Cooperation Administration (which would later become USAID), with funding from the Ford Foundation. In other words, it was one of America’s first official ‘international development’ programmes. But despite the millions of dollars that donors like USAID and the Ford Foundation pumped into this project, it was failing miserably. Developmentalism continued to gain pace in Latin America, and many voters wanted yet more nationalisation, land reforms and cooperati...