So, same old story, different century…

“During the 1950s and 1960s, the United States had become particularly concerned about Chile. As the home of the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and figures like Raúl Prebisch, Chile had become the centre of developmentalist [=Western-style internal economic development, building an independent economy not subjected to exploitation by foreign institutions/corporations] thinking in Latin America. The US feared that these ideas would spread across the rest of the continent. To counter this tendency, 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. […] Developmentalism received a promising boost when voters elected Salvador Allende – a thoughtful, unpretentious doctor with thick-rimmed spectacles who was popular for his progressive views. At the time, much of Chile’s population was still mired in extreme poverty, while a small elite controlled most of the country’s vast land and wealth. Allende […] established a minimum wage, reduced the price of bread, rolled out free school meals, expanded low-income housing and extended public transportation to working-class neighbourhoods. He nationalised the copper mines and capped land ownership at 80 hectares (fully compensating all private owners), ending the colonial latifundia [=vast land estates] and redistributing land to peasant farmers. And it worked. Wages rose, poverty rates declined, school enrolment reached record levels. But the United States was not happy. Allende’s nationalisation and land reform programmes appeared to threaten US economic interests; after all, US corporations had $964 million invested in Chile and were earning an average return of 17.4 per cent on it. Allende pledged full compensation for anyone who would lose their property or investments as a result, but this failed to pacify the US, which feared Allende’s popularity would trigger a broader turn to the left in Latin America. At the time, 20 per cent of total US foreign investments were tied up in Latin America, and US firms had 5,436 subsidiaries in the region, with significant profits at stake; they didn’t want to see the rise of more Allende-style governments among Chile’s neighbours. At first, the United States tried to force Allende to back off his nationalisation programme by applying non-military pressure, doing everything in their power to strangle the Chilean economy. President Richard Nixon famously ordered the CIA director, Richard Helms, to ‘make the economy scream’. The US blocked government loans to Chile and encouraged private banks to do the same. They placed a moratorium on Chilean copper imports for six months, thus depleting Chile’s foreign currency reserves. And the CIA used El Mercurio, a newspaper owned by US multinational ITT, to disseminate anti-Allende propaganda. …” (from "The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets’’ by Jason Hickel)

edit: there’s also the related Aphgan textbooks www.npr.org/sections/ed/…/q-a-j-is-for-jihad