Intellectual and Political Sociability Between the Late ECLAC and CIEPLAN: From Criticism of the Chilean Economic Model (1973-1990) to the Birth of Neo-Structuralism

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The paradigmatic rise of the Chicago Boys during the Pinochet regime (1973-1990) was a radical response against the state-led import substitution industrialization and its intellectual influence from CEPAL. Although CEPAL's ideas and history have attracted great interest, reflections on CEPAL’s role during the Chilean authoritarian regime are often limited. In this paper, I intend to offer systematic new evidence and perspectives on the behavior of CEPAL during Pinochet’s government. I argue that, in a context where CEPAL had been losing its influence and experimenting with several problems, some of its economists developed political and intellectual sociability with members of the think tank called Corporation of Studies for Latin America (CIEPLAN) to criticize Chilean economic policies. Moreover, this complex historical process was one of the sources of the birth of neo-structuralism in the late 1980s.