The award-winning documentary, Chicago Boys, by filmmakers Carola Fuentes and Rafael Valdeavellano, starts in the 1950s, when a group of Chilean students received grants to study economics under Milton Friedman at Chicago University. They deny they were ‘party political’ but some were rightwing Catholics and members of Opus Dei, a cult which flourished in Franco’s Spain.

On graduating, they taught at the Catholic University in Santiago for many years. Then Salvador Allende won Chile’s presidential election in 1970, as leader of the Popular Unity coalition. Without the Chicago economists’ input and collaboration, which produced ‘The Brick’, the alternative economic plan they presented to Pinochet, the military may have been reluctant to move against Allende. After the coup one of them, Sergio de Castro, was appointed Pinochet’s Economics Minister.

While the Chicago Boys claim they were ‘only concerned with economics’, their answers show otherwise. They argue it would have been impossible to make the ‘necessary changes’ in Chile without an authoritarian regime and ‘some’ violation of human rights. This was Pinochet’s ‘shock doctrine’, that undermined democracy and turned Chile into the first and most extreme neoliberal country in the world.

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