Introduction: Neoliberalism in the Americas. Brutal experiments,distressful realities,and conspicuous contestations

When in 2019 a group of colleagues concerned about the current state of capitalism held the Conference “Neoliberalism in the Americas” at Duke University, ¹ we did not imagine that by the end of that year many people from different backgrounds in Chile would take to the streets to demonstrate against a new unjustified price increase, this time in public transportation. Unlike what the government thought at the moment—a government led by a millionaire entrepreneur—, it was not an isolated protest. The truth is that the rage expressed on October 18th catalyzed the fatigue that for decades had dragged the population of the country. From the 1970s on, and with the help of dictator Augusto Pinochet, economist Milton Friedman had put into practice the monetarist theory he had been only teaching at the University of Chicago. It is not surprising that many of the graffiti that transformed the clean urban landscape of the Chilean cities alluded to the discontent with the economic model, being perhaps the most evident one that read: “El neoliberalismo nace y muere en Chile” (Neoliberalism was born and will die in Chile).

As a matter of fact, in Latin America, we had grown accustomed to seeing and experiencing processes of neoliberalization as the ultimate shock treatment (Klein, 2008). Our very own 09/11, which inaugurated the era of neoliberal hegemony in 1973, marked the birth of what Brenner and Theodore (2002) termed “actually existing neoliberalism.” ² Though to this day many still believe so, ³ Chile did not wake up the next morning to a dreamworld characterized by a flight from the road to serfdom. Rather, as one knows, the first laboratory of neoliberal experimentation was installed by a coup d’état organized by the “ad hoc committee on Chile,” in which not only economically interested parties, such as directors of corporations like ITT Inc. (International Telephone & Telegraph), Purina, Bank of America, and Pfizer took part, but also key figures of the American government, including National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Attorney General John Mitchell, as well as President Richard Nixon himself, as another round of declassified documents has recently shown (see National Security Archive, 2020). Popular support for elected president Salvador Allende could not be undermined merely through “softer” tactics of economic warfare; it had to be executed by direct military action. The reason for this was simple: although in a very contested election that needed the intervention of the parliament to finally proclaim Salvador Allende as president, Chileans had not voted for a neoliberal project; quite on the contrary, Allende was elected on a developmentalist, progressive, and left-leaning program: “La vía chilena al socialismo” (the Chilean road to socialism). Rather than bringing Chileans the freedom to choose the color of their own ties, as Milton Friedman would have it, Augusto Pinochet and his Chicago boys have left a pile of dead, mutilated, and disappeared bodies behind—along with one of the most unequal societies in the world.

From its onset, neoliberalism has always been a matter that concerned the Americas as a continent. It bound together Chicago and Santiago, Washington and Valparaiso in one single package of authoritarian rule and unfettered capitalism, blemished with Nobel prizes, wealth concentration, and always-renewed, never-fulfilled promises of freedom and economic growth. Daniel Borzutzky’s poetry—who in his personal trajectory (as a Chicago-based son of Chilean immigrants) has witnessed this international collusion—is eloquent in this point. In a poem not fortuitously titled “Lake Michigan merges into the Bay of Valparaiso, Chile,” one reads:

the reasons for which our blood is drawn in the prison camps of Lake Michigan are not communicated to us

the reasons for which we are imprisoned are also not communicated to us

it is often said on the shores of Lake Michigan, which is the Bay of Valparaiso, that we will die for reasons we do not understand.

we do not understand why we do not understand why we will die

we do not understand why we do not understand why we are imprisoned

we do not understand why we do not understand why we are paid or beaten or loved

we do not understand why last night the authoritative bodies loaded up four ships worth of prisoners and why those boats are half a mile away from the beach, booming dance music, baking in the summer sun. (Borzutzky, 2016: 125–6)

In his poem, the waters that bathe Chicago are the same that drift down to the Southern Hemisphere, entering the twin cities of Viña del Mar and Valparaíso, bringing with them bodies ashore of resistance fighters who dared to refuse “the brick”—a bulky economic, social, and cultural program drafted and imposed by University of Chicago-coached economists—and, for that, were thrown by planes and helicopters in the Pacific Ocean. As Borzutzky explains, “In this poem the beaches of Lake Michigan and the Bay of Valparaiso . . . merge together in my imagination. Here the broken bodies on the beaches of Lake Michigan, the beaten bodies, the privatized bodies, the immigrant bodies, the starving bodies, do not understand why they are detained, tortured, arbitrarily abused or commanded to abuse one another” (Borzutzky, n.d.).

Still today, when traveling to Valparaiso, the port city where Pinochet himself was born and where the coup began with the military actions taken by Admiral José Toribio Merino Castro, one can find a peculiar souvenir on touristic shops: statues of Augusto “Daniel López” ⁴ Pinochet, a haunting reminder of his enduring presence. In 2013, his ghost still haunted Chile’s politics: Michelle Bachelet, the daughter of an Air Force brigadier tortured to death by the dictatorship, faced (and defeated) Evelyn Matthei, a right-wing coalition economist, and the daughter of an Air Force general who had a key role in the dictatorship. In spite of being a minoritarian group, polls found that almost 10% of Chileans considered Pinochet’s rule as very positive (O’Brien, 2013). A 10% that still today influence the political life of Chileans. Although a referendum carried out in October 2020 showed that 78% of the Chilean population would rather change its Constitution written and promulgated 40 years ago under the dictatorship, yet an alarming 22% supported the old document. This shows that, as traumatic as it was, the neoliberal authoritarian experience remains to be significantly supported in Chile. As disquieting as this endorsement of a blood-stained dictator is, those figures were but a fraction of the wave of right-wing radicalism that would hit the continent once again just a few years later.

The appalling image of tanks and military marching on the streets of Santiago and the bombing of La Moneda with President Allende inside were not destined to be a once-in-a-lifetime experiment that short-circuited reactionary landowners and religious fanatics, corporative CEOs and military forces, monetarists, and anti-leftists. The same form of alliance, now organized by and through digital social media, would resurface almost 40 years later, this time in countries such as the U.S., El Salvador, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. As economist Paul Samuelson once stated, “if the ‘Chicago Boys’ and admirals of Chile had not existed, we should have to invent them as an archetypical case” (see Chamayou, 2021: 675). Indeed, when Francis Fukuyama announced the “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1989: 4), he was actually indicating the triumph of capitalism and the hegemony of neoliberalism as the ideological, political, and economic project that sustained it. He was certainly assertive because neoliberalism has become so ubiquitous that any opposition to it is considered a nonsense that goes against reason, progress, order, and the so-declared best version of the world (Peet, 2003: 4).

In Brazil, history would repeat itself almost to the script with the coalition of the one-time army captain Jair Bolsonaro and Paulo Guedes, his very own Chicago boy—who not only was trained in Economics at the University of Chicago but also worked at the Universidad de Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship. As an orthodox Chicagoan, Guedes has stated several times that his plan is to privatize all State-owned companies in the country (see Wiziack, 2020). In a visit to Washington in 2019 (during Trump’s administration), when commenting on the street protests that began to spread in countries such as Argentina and especially Chile (at the time trying to settle the score with Pinochet’s legacy), Guedes also mentioned—in what sounded like a (not so) veiled threat—the Ato Institucional 5 (see Betim, 2019), the document promulgated by President Artur da Costa e Silva that inaugurated the most brutal and authoritarian phase of the Brazilian military dictatorship in December 1968. ⁵ Typically, the neoliberal aftermath replicates itself: after 3 years in power, the holy alliance government of Bolsonaro and economic guidance of Guedes has led wealth concentration and social inequality levels to their worst scenarios since 2000, with 1% of the population draining almost 50% of all wealth produced in the country. As a share of gross assets, financial assets have risen from 41.4% to 50.2% in Brazil from 2000 to 2021 (see Credit Suisse, 2021), in line with David Harvey’s (2011: 14 ff.) thesis of a counterrevolution from the elites as neoliberalism’s raison d’être. The neoliberal therapy, as usual, is not working. A long-predicted diagnostic by André Gunder Frank, who in 1976 had warned his former professor that administering the Chicago medicine usually kills its patient (Gunder Frank’s dissertation in Economics had been chaired by Milton Friedman). In fact, his analysis of how this medicine was impacting Chilean families at the time anticipated what would become a characteristic feature of Neoliberalism, that is, precarization: “it is easy to calculate that, according to official prices and the official ‘living wage’, in February 1974, family bread consumption alone and the bus fares to earn it amounted to about 80% of the ‘living wage’” (Gunder Frank, 1976: 883).

As one constantly witnesses, this precarization has taken many different forms from the 1970s onwards. Urbanist Mike Davis has stated that slums “became an implacable future not just for poor rural migrants, but also for millions of traditional urbanities displaced or immiserated by the violence of [neoliberal] ‘adjustment[s]’” (2006: 152). And for those displaced from their own countries due to economic, political, and/or climate crises, migration turned into the only possible form of survival—a condition that, for Stuart Hall, was magnified by late capitalism at the end of the 20th century (2007). As observed during Donald Trump’s administration (2017–2021), the other side of this phenomenon was the chauvinistic reinforcement of national frontiers (Brown, 2019). Almost his entire presidential campaign was based on spurring fear among the conservative sectors of the U.S. population about the menace the “bad hombres” from the Southern side of the border represented for American workers. Actually, along with this nationalistic international policy, Trumpism also promoted the “strengthening of the neoliberal-oriented macroeconomic policy at the domestic level” (Cozzolino, 2018: 50). Among other measures, this hardening included the decrease of social expenditures and the increase of the defense budget (Cozzolino, 2018: 47). Indeed, this was only enhanced since it is a feature already introduced by Reaganomics, as Bergsten noticed in 1981, also specifying that the “primary motives [we]re not economic in nature, but structural and ideological” (25).

A similar distribution of the national budget has taken place in Brazil since Bolsonaro was elected, something that has deeply affected cultural and educational institutions, as well as the budget for health policies. The reconfiguration of public expenditure has had dramatic effects such as cuts in research and education, the fires of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro and the Cinemateca Nacional in São Paulo, and the criminal management of the pandemics that has cost the lives of over 650,000 Brazilians so far.

However, this reshaping of an old tale also posed new challenges for contemporary critical theories. One crucial difference stands out: then, the “free markets-imprisoned bodies” project had to be forced down in the Southern Cone, and it was met with direct resistance in the social body; now, it has been voted in power by the majority of the people. ⁶ It seems that almost half a century of a “stealth revolution” (Brown, 2017) remaking the State and the body social (fueled by entrepreneurial ideology, rural agribusiness, armed forces, and police support, as well as evangelical empires) have finally managed to realize the original plan. Albion Patterson, director of the U.S. International Cooperation Administration in Chile, formulated this as the need to “change the formation of the men” (see Valdés, 1995: 110–113); in 1981, Margaret Thatcher also uttered her version of this neoliberal Bildung-dystopia: “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul” (Thatcher, 1981).

With these new challenges in mind, a group of colleagues from Brazil, Chile, Italy, and the U.S. decided to organize the International Conference “Neoliberalism in the Americas,” seeking to promote a dialogue among different disciplines, continental latitudes, and generations of researchers and scholars. The main goal of this Conference was gathering different perspectives on and from the global South at Duke University, in order to problematize mainstream theorizations on Neoliberalism. Our impression is that all of the participants contributed to show the ways in which, in recent decades, authoritarianism and economics have necessarily worked hand in hand in Latin America to expand the privileges of a few and the precarization of the majority under the umbrella of this latest version of capitalism. The keynote speakers included Brazilian Philosopher Vladimir Safatle, also a contributor to this volume, who referred to the fascist aspect of Neoliberalism in Latin America; and also U.S. scholar on African and African American Studies Michaeline Crichlow who, along with the Economist from the University of West Indies, Patricia Northover, commented on race and primitive accumulation in the island of Hispaniola. The conference also comprised a screening of Carola Fuentes’ and Rafael Valdeavellano’s documentary Chicago boys, followed by a lively debate. The majority of this special issue is composed of a selection of papers presented by scholars from all over the Americas during the event.

Safatle’s article, which opens the special issue, examines the relationship between moral and political economy today. Since the early days of the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938 and the rise of the Mont Pèlerin Society, claims the Brazilian philosopher, neoliberal rationality has been characterized by the incursion of terminologies originally belonging to the realm of morals into the economic sphere. The subjectivation modes of politics today are, according to his argument, saturated by the attempt to address individuals as moral subjects and to deal with economic issues as psychological matters—thus reconfiguring social conflict as individual (ergo treatable) questions. To illustrate his argument, Safatle analyzes the reengineering of the grammar of psychological suffering set in motion by the neoliberal coup de force that finds its way into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this rich and complex essay, Safatle also tackles the parallels between neoliberalism and fascism regarding the State, the theoretical justification of dictatorships, sovereign violence, and authoritarianism—which is accomplished by the joint discussion of Friedrich Hayek and Carl Schmitt.

Buenos Aires–based scholar Santiago Roggerone writes the second article, addressing the past and current history of another early laboratory of neoliberalism set in the Southern Cone, namely, Argentina. Roggerone focuses on the recent neoliberal iteration represented by Mauricio Macri, in which, unlike former versions of Argentinian neoliberalism, the ruling classes sought to relinquish intermediaries (whether the military, Unión Cívica Radical, or even Peronism) to represent their economic and political project and decided to put in power a “government of CEOs.” The IMF de facto rule in Argentina, he argues, has continued despite a more progressive turn with the election of Peronist Alberto Fernández. Drawing from Argentine critical thinkers such as José Aricó and Eduardo Grüner, Roggerone advocates for a truly global perspective on critical theory, one able to see “both the Part and the Totality.” He also comments on how different actors in the Left (the Frente de Izquierda y los Trabajadores, the piqueteros movement, the Workers’ Confederation of Popular Economy, the Ni una menos collective, among others) have resisted the return of neoliberalism in Argentina. The question he pursues is: “has the last victory of neoliberalism been a pyrrhic one?”

Literature is the main topic of the next two contributions to this special issue. In “A Visionary Geography: Raúl Zurita and the Problem of the Land,” Michael Shea analyzes the works of one of the canonical poetic voices that emerged during the Chilean dictatorship. Along with other artists like Diamela Eltit, Zurita founded the art collective CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte) in 1979, and his poetry has intervened not only in his own body but also in the national geography seeking to perform some of the mourning rituals left unconcluded by the forced disappearances occurred under the Pinochet regime. Shea’s article dialogues with the critical tradition that agrees on “the foundational role anti-dictatorship politics and memorialization play in Zurita’s spatially-conscious poetry,” to elaborate on what he considers “the sometimes strange and contradictory positioning of the Chilean landscape, especially as it appears in [his] early work.” For Shea, these contradictions intuit the “economic substrate” that transformed land administration from President Eduardo Frei Montalva’s agrarian reform to neoliberalism. Yet, the article by Bárbara Fernández-Melleda deals with a female poetic voice that somehow figures the effects of neoliberalism in post-dictatorial Chile. In “Neoliberalism and Neocolonialism in Nadia Prado’s ©Copyright (2003): Towards a Decolonial Reading,” Fernández-Melleda studies how Prado’s poetry relates to neoliberalism and cultural imperialism in Chile and Latin America, by using Walter Mignolo’s decolonial work. The relevance the author sees in ©Copyright is related to its strong critique of capitalism, for it “seeks to subvert the neoliberal, profit-driven, use of language.” Ultimately, Fernández-Melleda proposes that the uncommercial status of poetry turns it into an intrinsic and privileged artistic stage to contest capitalism.

The intersection of homosexuality, market, and democracy is the subject addressed by Montreal-based scholar Abelardo León-Donoso. In “Homomercracia - The commodification of sexual and gender diversity in Chilean democracy,” he reflects on the instrumentalization of sexual and gender minorities’ identities performed by right-wing political rhetoric to advance its agenda. León-Donoso analyzes the trajectory of a group historically marginalized from the Human Rights movement and the political debate in Chile, that eventually turned into an important force for the victory of the conservative coalition during the second decade of the 2000s. However, as he shows, the subject located at the intersection of homomercracia is the “good homosexual.” A subject who rather than being a rupture of the male/female historical binary, reinscribes the colonial patriarchal white, wealthy, young cisgender, and successful masculine figure, at the expense of those bodies that do not fit within this new stereotyped homosexual. This sanitized individual, which is sold through the press, artistic venues, and social networks, becomes a commodity for candidates and political parties that dispute their endorsement as his increasing popularity holds electoral worth. It is through its commodification—that is, as an object of political desire—that non-heteronormative sexual and gender identities, argues the author, find their rights and recognition as citizens.

“The Microcredit Mousetrap” is the title of the next article of the special issue. Antonio Orozco provides a critical reflection on the microcredit programs that are currently offered to low-income and marginalized Mexican populations. Orozco argues that the microcredit system promotes the idea of overcoming poverty through individual entrepreneurship. However, the abusive conditions of loans render people trapped in a system of perpetual indebtedness that resembles the colonial hacienda economic model known as “la raya.” The author claims that microcredit is the newest neoliberal weapon for financial slavery in Mexico, which, in turn, could only be put behind if impoverished communities were empowered and class solidarity was exercised.

Finally, an interview with Australian scholar Melinda Cooper by Brazilian academic Bruna Della Torre constitutes the concluding component of this volume. Following the argument of Cooper’s 2019 book Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, the interview addresses the historical and present coalitions between neoconservatives and neoliberals, particularly when it comes to the issue of “family responsibility”—which is usually taken as a field dominated exclusively by religious and moral arguments. Cooper shows how neoliberals have also converged in this domain, demanding that families (and in them, especially women) take over the roles formerly performed by the welfare State. Della Torre and Cooper also discuss religion, Trump, fascism, the nation-State, as well as the tasks of a non-dualist Left agenda today—one able to tackle neoconservatism and neoliberalism simultaneously.

Together, these essays help to challenge a linear and top-down approach to neoliberalism, as if it had torn its democratic veil only in its most recent form after 2008, Trumpism, and Bolsonaro (see Dardot and Laval, 2019: 14). While these experiments unequivocally represent steps toward more authoritarian societies when compared to their previous administrations, it all depends on when and where we choose to place the onset of neoliberalization: if Chile ’73 is to be seen as one of its points of departure, then it becomes clear that de-democratization has always lied at the core of the project.

They also allow us to grasp concretely how neoliberalism has often managed to blend with dissimilar ideologies, economic approaches, and political regimes—sometimes with its seeming opposites, such as developmentalism or a formal and depleted version of democracy—, producing platypus-like configurations, to employ the metaphor forged by Brazilian sociologist Francisco de Oliveira (2003), in a distinct, albeit related context.

We hope this special issue, with subjects ranging from psychoanalysis to poetry—with politics, sexuality, and economy in between—will provide readers with insights that lead us to advance the critique of neoliberalism from a more systemic point of view.

We believe it is, perhaps, a particularly appropriate time to do so. In fact, after half a century since the coup that defined most of the world’s destinies in the decades to come, Chile, once again, has the continent holding its breath. The election of a student activist—the youngest president in the country’s history, with deep grassroots ties to social movements and unions, and a cabinet composed mostly of women—represents a unique chance to start undoing this bloodstained history.

We know neoliberalism was born in Chile. Whether or not it will die there has yet to be seen.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-cdy-10.1177_09213740221093081 – Supplemental material for Introduction: Neoliberalism in the Americas. Brutal experiments, distressful realities, and conspicuous contestations

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-cdy-10.1177_09213740221093081 for Introduction: Neoliberalism in the Americas. Brutal experiments, distressful realities, and conspicuous contestations by Eduardo Altheman, Mónica González García and Ximena Martínez in Cultural Dynamics