A Message from the Editor: Seeing Ourselves in Others: How Latin America Can Help the United States Know Itself

Dear Readers: I learned a lesson during the preparation of the last issue, my first as editor of the Journal of Global South Studies. The lesson was this: the amount of time that passes between the submission of this essay and its printing and distribution is significant enough that the topic at hand might seem a bit dated by the time it reaches you. Such was the case with my comments on developments in Venezuela, which were red-hot in the news cycle at the time I submitted my initial draft, and absent from the news by the time the issue was out. This does not mean the relevance of the issues had disappeared. Quite the contrary. The grim realities I described have not been resolved just because they have disappeared from the ever-churning news mill, and the underlying causes of those realities are even more resistant to change. Nevertheless, the point that the news cycle moves very, very fast was not lost on me.

With that in mind, I will say that by the time you read this, the Association of Global South Studies—the parent organization of this journal—will have recently concluded its annual conference. At the time of this writing, many of us are packing our bags for Buenos Aires, Argentina, the site of this year's meeting. Therefore, it seems like an opportune time to reflect on what has been going on in Latin America. Admittedly this is low-hanging fruit for me, given my own specialization in Latin American political history. Nevertheless, Latin America is on one of its periodic up-cycles in terms of its exposure in the U.S. news (which, lamentably, usually means it's on something of a down-cycle in terms of its political affairs).

In Chile, protestors recently took to the streets, wreaking havoc in a country that routinely boasts of its functional, conciliation-oriented democracy (its leaders and citizens made similar claims for decades, before the onset of a brutal seventeen-year military dictatorship in 1973 buried any illusion that such things simply do not happen in Chile). Ostensibly the demonstrators objected to a routine rate increase in subway fares, but popular grievances ran much deeper. What should have provoked a mild disturbance instead unleashed a welter of anger that wasn't really about mass transit prices at all. Rather, it had to do with the entire package of free-market reforms that collectively have come to be known as "neoliberalism." The ticket price hike was merely the last straw.

This is curious for two interrelated reasons: First, Chile is often seen as the birthplace of neoliberalism, or at least the place where it was first put into practice in a systematic, planned manner. Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, in her controversial book (and later documentary) The Shock Doctrine, notes that before Reaganism or Thatcherism, there was Chile—a kind of laboratory in which an intellectual project incubated over decades, beginning with the Mont Pelerin Society and its leader, Friedrich Hayek, and later by the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago and its most brilliant theorist, Milton Friedman, could be applied all at once, rather than piecemeal.

The story by now is relatively familiar—a generation of Chilean economists became disciples of Friedman at Chicago before returning to Chile. When U.S. economic pressure conspired with Cold War hysteria, Chile's middle classes called for a military coup, which occurred in 1973. Soon after, those economists, who would come to be known as "Los Chicago Boys," caught the ear of soon-to-be dictator Augusto Pinochet, delivering him an economic blueprint so extensive that it would come to be called "the brick." In it were plans to convert Chile into the world's first fully privatized and unregulated economy. There can be little denial, even by those who supported and stood to benefit from this agenda, that the armed forces had to inflate, then exploit, a crisis in order to get Chile's poor majority, who in the years immediately...