The the Hello and

I'm going to Behind the News, my name is Doug Henwood.

Two guests today, first the sociologist and political scientist Renee Rojas

will explain the roots of this social explosion

we've seen in Chile over the last couple of weeks.

Is neoliberalism dying in the country where it was born?

And then the development economist Ingrid Harvold Van Graven will explain the work of the three economists who won the Nobel Prize for their

constricted hyper-impirical research in poor countries.

First, Chile.

On October 1st, the authorities announced an increase in the fair in the Santiago Metro. It was a small rise in the order of 4%,

but the fair was already quite high and it set off a wave of student-led protests that have grown

into a mass uprising. Metro stations and buses were burned and over a

million people poured into the streets to say they've had enough. What they've

had enough of was no small matter. Decades of brutal neoliberalism is

to do with the coup against elected President

Salvador Alliende in 1973, a coup led by General Augusto Pinochet.

Pinochet, with the intellectual assistance of reactionary economists trained at the University of Chicago and other U.S. Universities imposed Chicago's dream of a regime,

privatizing everything, cutting social benefits to the bone, and letting capital have its way.

Pineschee ruled until 1990 and was succeeded by a series of governments that applied a softer

version of the neoliberal agenda but with no serious departure.

The mass of Chileans has lived with austerity and insecurity

for nearly five decades.

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