New Latin American Perspectives on the History of Neoliberalism
A roundtable discussion with César Castillo-García, Matilde Ciolli, and José Antonio Galindo Domínguez
The 13th plenary meeting of the Consejo Interamericano de Comercio y Producción, October 8, 1970, via rafaelcaldera.com.
Many are familiar with the story of neoliberalism arriving in Chile under the leadership of economists who trained at the University of Chicago. But the history of neoliberalism in Latin American involves multiple trajectories of diverse origin. HPE Project grantees César Castillo-García (‘22), Matilde Ciolli (‘22), and José Antonio Galindo Domínguez (‘24) gathered for a roundtable discussion on how their historical research can inform a more nuanced understanding of contemporary issues in Latin American political economy.
***
How does your research on neoliberalism in Latin America extend or complicate the now-canonical narrative of the “Chicago Boys”?
César Castillo-García (CCG): I recount the story of Peruvian neoliberals as pioneers in South America. They leveraged a civic-military coup in 1948 to implement their policies nearly three decades before Chileans followed suit. Operating independently of Chicago’s influence, the ideas of Peruvian technocrats and businessmen were shaped by their experiences in national and international policymaking during the Great Depression and the postwar period. Their primary goal was to safeguard capitalist profits, and, in contrast to typical accounts of neoliberalism, they occasionally opposed IMF recommendations. Peruvian neoliberals were regarded as equals by their American and European counterparts in the Mont Pèlerin Society.
Matilde Ciolli (MC): My research explores the origins of neoliberalism in Argentina and Guatemala. In Argentina, neoliberal ideas began to spread after the coup that ousted Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, and in Guatemala, after the CIA-orchestrated coup in 1954. Chile was thus not the first “laboratory” of neoliberalism in Latin America, nor were the economic ideas of the Chicago School the first to influence Latin American neoliberalism. In both Argentina and Guatemala, the primary theoretical influence came from the Austrian School of Economics, particularly Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. The Chicago school had less influence in Argentina, though in 1961 the Catholic University of Chile and the University of Chicago signed an agreement to build a neoliberal training hub in Mendoza on the Chilean model, and Chicago-trained economists held several posts in the last dictatorship.
José Antonio Galindo Domínguez (AG): In the Mexican context, the trope of the Chicago Boys has, unfortunately, become a sort of prêt-à-porter explanation, serving as both an intellectual shortcut in academia and a powerful discursive tool for the partisan Left in national politics. The notion that a group of technocrats, trained at US universities and led by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, introduced neoliberalism in Mexico has constrained our understanding of the country’s neoliberal experience. This explanation is often taken for granted as the ultimate account of the emergence and consolidation of the neoliberal project. Recent historical research has begun to dismantle the myth of Mexico’s so-called Chicago Boys.
Tell us about the institutions, networks, and individuals who populate your work.
CCG: Pedro Beltrán, a Machiavellian businessman and technocrat from Peru, had close ties to neoliberal figures like Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt. Beltrán’s newspaper, La Prensa, served as a prominent platform for advancing neoliberalism until its closure in 1984. The Lima Chamber of Commerce was highly influential under Rómulo Ferrero, the first Peruvian member of the Mont Pèlerin Society. Beltrán and Ferrero also held posts leading the Peruvian Central Bank and the Ministry of Treasury, where they championed monetary stability and austerity over redistribution. In addition, I found a nexus between Wilhelm Röpke and businessmen Max Reiser and Carlo Mariotti, who led the Swiss-Peruvian Chamber of Commerce and important business schools.
MC: In 1957 Alberto Benegas Lynch, an Argentine wine entrepreneur and member of the Mont Pèlerin Society, founded the Centro de Difusión de la Economía Libre, modeled after the US Foundation for Economic Education. The following year, Manuel Ayau, a Guatemalan businessman and later president and vice president of the Mont Pèlerin Society, established the Centro de Estudios Económico-Sociales. Both institutions had their own journals and actively promoted free enterprise through international conferences, translations and publications, and forming networks with like-minded international organizations.
AG: Gustavo Velasco, who had ties to thinkers like Mises and Hayek since the 1940s and founded the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales y Económicas in 1953 with Agustín Navarro, played a key role in articulating the Latin American neoliberal network. He made connections with Lynch, who Matilde just mentioned, as well as Henrique Pérez Dupuy and Ramón Díaz. Mexican businessmen linked to a continental business organization, the Consejo Interamericano de Comercio y Producción, also played a crucial role in defining a neoliberal business consensus since at least the 1950s. Indeed Mexican entrepreneurs organized in business associations were vital to the reconfiguration of the North American political economy later on, especially as they helped design the framework agreements preceding the negotiation of NAFTA. Mexican business elites had two main objectives: to depoliticize the Mexican and North American economies through a trade agreement, and to secure access to the US market.
In the cases you study, how does neoliberalism relate to fascism and dictatorship? Where do populist and emancipatory social movements fit in?
CCG: Some Peruvian neoliberals embraced fascist ideas, including corporatism, promoted as a “third way” between capitalism and communism, as well as a staunch anti-Marxism. Pedro Beltrán, for example, sympathized with the fascist Unión Revolucionaria (UR) and allied with the reactionary Acción Patriótica during elections. Notably, another member of La Prensa and LSE alumni, Manuel Mujica Gallo, was affiliated to UR. Some neoliberals also justified state violence to suppress the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, which used to be a leftist populist movement. And, like the fascists, they were often conservative Catholics. By the 1960s, ordoliberals connected to the newspapers La Prensa and Expreso joined Opus Dei, in fierce opposition to Liberation Theology, and aligned with Acción Popular and the Partido Popular Cristiano. These organizations later supported Alberto Fujimori’s neoliberal dictatorship.
MC: My research focuses specifically on how Latin American neoliberals conceived authoritarianism as a political condition for the transition to a market economy. Although they had to contend with the persistence of strong state structures protected by the military, they supported the violent elimination of socialist-inspired social movements and guerrillas as a prerequisite of their neoliberal reorder. In Argentina, Álvaro Alsogaray supported the 1955 coup as an act of liberation from Peronist dirigisme. In 1966, he helped author the Acta de la Revolución Argentina, the founding document of General Onganía’s regime. During Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship (1976-1983), Alsogaray criticized the hybrid measures of Economy Minister Martínez de Hoz while defending the army’s brutal repression of political opponents. In Guatemala, the Universidad Francisco Marroquín, founded by the businessman Manuel Ayau whom I mentioned above, maintained close ties with the regimes of Carlos Arana Osorio (1970–1974) and Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–1983).
AG: At first glance, Mexican neoliberalism and fascism may seem unrelated. However, Mario Vargas Llosa’s term “the perfect dictatorship” reflects how Mexico’s post-revolutionary regime concentrated power to stabilize the nation. During the developmentalist era, Mexican business elites accepted discretionary power as long as it contained popular demands. The 1982 bank nationalization, however, revealed that concentrated power could also threaten their privileges by reshaping the economy. In response, these elites mobilized US allies to advocate for a trade agreement that constrained governmental actions in both nations. This effort eventually paved the way for NAFTA, exploiting a reconfigured state designed to serve markets while employing its coercive power to suppress social demands.
How does your research help us understand developments in the political economy of Latin America today?
CCG: Neoliberal businessmen and technocrats have played a crucial role in shaping Latin American institutions and public discourse, as seen in the Peruvian Central Bank’s influence in blocking pro-labor policies. Fujimori’s neoliberal populism combined privatization with targeted social policies to sustain its political legitimacy amid widespread precarity. Contemporary Peruvian authoritarians have inherited this model, and it mirrors the anticipated blend of social benefits and bureaucratic downsizing being trumpeted in the US today. Studying Latin American neoliberalism illuminates issues in the region itself as well as potential future trajectories of US and European populisms.
MC: Javier Milei’s current neoliberal government explicitly draws not only on the intellectual legacies of Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman but also on Argentina’s (neo)liberal tradition. Alberto Benegas Lynch, Jr., son of the pioneering neoliberal whom I mentioned above, who is also himself now a member of the Mont Pelèrin Society, publicly supported Milei’s electoral campaign. Since his election, Milei has promoted an anti-picketing protocol, the prohibition of inclusive language in public administration, an emergency decree restructuring the Argentine economy, the cancellation of National Scientific and Technical Research Council scholarships, and the closure of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo program (dedicated to the mothers of the desaparecidos of the last dictatorship) on public television. Studying the historical genesis of these neoliberal and authoritarian policies allows us to better understand their political effects.
AG: As we have established in this roundtable, Latin American actors were closely connected to the neoliberal intellectual collective, quickly establishing think tanks to advance neoliberal ideas from the outset. Over the past sixty years, these networks have expanded. In Mexico, the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales y Económicas, led by Velasco, has been linked to the Salinas business group since its inception, with the group contributing funds and participating in its publications. Today, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, heir to the family business, is an overt libertarian and has recently founded the Universidad de la Libertad to promote neoliberal ideas. Second, Mexican business groups that sought to depoliticize the economy through regional market agreement negotiations in the 1980s and 1990s achieved unprecedented success. This success lasted for more than 30 years, until economic consequences made the neoliberal project untenable, allowing new political groups to capitalize on discontent and gain power. Nevertheless, the project's success remains evident in the brutal wealth inequalities and the rise of many millionaires in the North American region.
***
César Castillo-García is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University. He earned his Ph.D. from The New School for Social Research and has been a visiting fellow at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University and at the Paris School of Economics. His research interests include the history of neoliberal ideas and capitalism, the history of fascism in the Americas, the study of income and wealth inequality, and political conflict. His recent projects explore the long-term history of authoritarian neoliberalism and its effects on distributive cycles, the long-run distributive history of Peru, and the misuses of neoliberal institutionalism in economic history.
Matilde Ciolli is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Milan. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Milan and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is currently working on her book, The Conservative Moment of Neoliberalism between Europe and the Americas. Alongside other international researchers, she leads the Groupe d’Études sur le Néolibéralisme et les Alternatives in Paris. Recently, she has authored several articles on the intellectual origins of neoliberalism in Argentina and its relationship with dictatorships.
José Antonio Galindo Domínguez is a Ph.D. student in History at El Colegio de México. His research explores the evolution of economic governance ideas and projects promoted by Mexican business groups during the latter half of the 20th century. He emphasizes the pivotal role of Mexican business leaders in advancing North American regional economic integration.