The long road of libertarians in Latin America: from think tanks to the halls of power

Behind, below and around the new right and far-right politicians proliferating in Latin America there is a backstory of people and institutions that, for decades now and from different locations, have been promoting a culture war to impose the ideals of freedom, as they would phrase it. This is no conspiracy, nor a secret plot, but rather the confluence of civil organizations, foundations and universities dedicated to recruiting and training young people, hosting lectures, financing projects, publishing books and magazines, and establishing a presence in mass media and virtual arenas. Although they have gone through many incarnations, their goal remains steady: to promote the benefits of the free market, a minimal state presence, individual development, and private property. Their creed is known today as libertarianism.

For years, their existence and activities were out of the spotlight — until they took center stage with the arrival of Javier Milei to the presidency of Argentina, and with the candidacy of Johannes Kaiser in Chile, to name a few recent cases.

Foundation for Economic Freedom, the Mont Pèlerin Society, the Cato Institute, the Atlas Network, the Mises Institute and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) are a few of the movement’s most notorious entities, and were founded in Europe and North America. Their model was replicated and exported for the formation of Argentina’s Centro de Estudios para la Libertad (Research Center for Freedom) and Brazil’s Instituto de Estudos Empresariais (Institute of Business Studies), among many other entities.

The Spanish-language book Los dueños de la libertad. Think tanks, dinero y batalla cultural (The owners of freedom: Think tanks, money and the culture war) is dedicated to untangling the history of this network of organizations and investigating the leaders behind its creation.

“When the figure of Milei emerged and began to rise, it seemed to me that there was an underreporting of a whole world that was out there,” says Vallejos in conversation with EL PAÍS, concerning the starting point of her research. “I began to pay attention to Milei’s environment, to the authors he quoted, to the names and foundations that kept coming up. Pulling on those threads, I found a world I didn’t know about, one that wasn’t built overnight, or even in recent years, but that a lot of work had gone into.”

The names that most often came out of Milei’s mouth were those of the economists of the so-called Austrian school: Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) and Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), among others. This list also features Alberto Benegas Lynch (Buenos Aires, 1940), who Milei considers a local “hero” of liberalism and, like Benegas Lynch’s father, a promoter and pioneer of the ideology in Argentina.

Vallejos pinpoints the first traces of libertarianism’s foundations and institutions in the mid-20th century, at the beginning of the Cold War, when they formed a reaction to the era’s socialism, Keynesianism and the welfare state.

“In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek writes that any policy of the State that places limits on individual decision leads immediately to authoritarianism,” she explains. Impressed by Hayek’s book, the English businessman Antony Fisher (1915-1988) sought him out and asked for advice on how to bring such ideas into politics. But the future winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics discouraged him. “He told him to forget about politics, that you had to go for minds, convince people, generate content, to create a new world,” says Vallejos. “He talked to him about a project that was going to take years, and Fisher put his fortune behind creating the first British free market think tank.”

And so was born in 1955 the Institute of Economic Affairs, which years later would be a training ground for Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990. During the same period, the Republican Party’s Ronald Reagan would be voted into the White House (1981-1989). Reagan was an admirer of the economist Hans Sennholz (1922-2007), a disciple of Von Mises who was a key influence on new generations at the exclusive, conservative and Christian Grove City College. In 1981, Fisher created the powerful Atlas Network. These were the years in which such ideas experienced a resurgence under the banner of neoliberalism, which many of its practitioners today reject.

Vallejos’ book chases the initiatives and leaders who, from these origins, went on to expand the ideology into Latin America. “The logic of the libertarian, liberal world is transnational,” observes the author. “It doesn’t work in a vacuum. [Its leaders] are constantly exchanging ideas, proposals, learning a lot from one another. There are narratives that are repeated, but not copied. Rather, they are applied with local idiosyncrasies in different countries.”

The pioneering Mont Pèlerin Society, founded by Hayek in 1947, extended its tentacles into Latin America two decades later: first in Venezuela, and then, Guatemala. The Atlas Network entered in the 1980s, eventually reaching from Mexico to South America. In the case of Argentina, the first importation of the model came early, back in 1957, when Benegas Lynch Sr. created the Centro de Difusión de la Economía Libre (Center of Diffusion for the Free Economy). From then on, there were numerous similar institutions, and still more that sprang out of internal divisions and bickering, from research centers to political alliances. By the mid-’70s, Benegas Lynch Jr. had founded the Escuela Superior de Economía y Administración de Empresas (the School of Economics and Business Administration, or ESEADE) — which bestowed Milei with an honorary doctorate. Perhaps the latest exponent of this saga is the Faro Foundation, presided over by the writer Agustín Laje.

Compared to this multitude of leaders, legislators and officials of the new libertarian ranks — “raised in the universe of the foundations,’ as Vallejos puts it — Milei is almost a new arrival.

“In 2014, Milei read a text by Rothbard and it fascinated him,” she says. Such was the politician’s baptism into the Austrian school of economics. In search of more books, he arrived at the Buenos Aires bookstore operated by Spain’s Unión Editorial, which belongs to this network of organizations. “Through the door of that bookstore, Milei entered the world of foundations,” says Vallejos. “He began giving talks and lectures, and more and more people began to attend.” His regular, strident appearances on TV increased his fame, which was multiplied by social media. “And at one point, the different tribes of liberalism began to close ranks around him. They saw in him a great communicator, which had been one of their weak points,” says the author. Less than a decade later, Milei entered the Casa Rosada and became, in his own words, “history’s first libertarian liberal president.”

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