The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism by Sebastian Edwards

The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism by Sebastian Edwards

part i
The Early Years

1

Exporting Capitalism
the origins of the chicago boys
on june 27, 1955, Theodore Schultz, the chairman of the Department 
of Economics at the University of Chicago and a future Nobel Prize 
laureate, landed at Santiago’s old Los Cerrillos Airport. He was accom-

panied by three of his colleagues who were fluent in Spanish: Earl Ham-

ilton, Arnold Harberger, and Simon Rottenberg. The purpose of the trip 
was to negotiate an agreement between the University of Chicago and 
the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Pontifical Catholic Uni-

versity of Chile), commonly known as just Católica, aimed at modern-

izing the teaching of economics in Chile and Latin America. At the 
airport, the Chicagoans were greeted by fifth-year students Sergio de 
Castro and Ernesto Fontaine, who would be their chaperones during 
the two-week visit. A year later, De Castro and Fontaine were among 
the first Chileans enrolled in the Chicago graduate program in econom-

ics. Little did they know that they would eventually change the course 
of economic policy not only in Chile but also in the rest of Latin America 
and in many emerging and Eastern European nations. During the late 
1990s and early 2000s, they traveled the world explaining how the Chi-

cago Boys’ policies had transformed a country that for decades had had 
a mediocre performance into the most vibrant and advanced nation in 
Latin America. In most of their travels they had to confront demonstra-

tors who denounced the model’s “original sin,” the fact that it had been 
launched during a dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet, one of the

The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism by Sebastian Edwards