The myth of privatization in Chile

Abstract

The author maintains that the privatization of enterprises remains a central issue in Latin-American politics, and that the same arguments about its efficiency and necessity are repeated in all of its countries. He denounces this as a dependency of the Latin-American governing elites to the “requirements of globalization”, and adds that it is not only an ideological issue, because privatizations allow to buy enterprises at low prices with high return. He then analyses the history of the irruption of privatizations in Chile, and its consequences on its national economy, arguing that they represented a fundamental tool that made possible for power to change hands after the 1973 coup d’Etat; and that since 1990, they have been one of the key elements of what the author defines as a neoliberal democracy.