A atuação da CEPAL durante o regime autoritário de Pinochet (1973-1990) e suas mutações institucionais, intelectuais e profissionais

Abstract

Although economic ideas of CEPAL are one of the leading research topics in the history of economics in Latin America, the literature has paid scarce attention to how the context surrounding its headquarters in Chile shaped the Comission's intellectual production and activities. More specifically, the role of CEPAL during the Pinochet regime remains largely unexplored. This PhD Thesis aims to contribute to the literature by comprehending the influence of the Chilean authoritarian regime on CEPAL and its positions regarding the rise of the Chicago Boys. The results demonstrate the Commission's complex institutional and political situation at the time. Despite being a United Nations agency, it needed to equilibrate between the regime's repression and the need to assist technically with the projects of the Chilean government. CEPAL did not behave as a purely bureaucratic island disconnected from its surroundings. On the contrary, it acted in defense of human rights in the country and criticized, even if sometimes cautiously, the Chicago Boys' neoliberal economic policies and reforms. It would be caricatural to characterize CEPAL, from an institutional point of view, as opposition to the regime. However, its economists acted as opposition through their insertion within political networks in public debate created by the progressive sectors of the Catholic Church, from which other leading opposition groups also participated. CEPAL and the opposition catholic social world built connections based on elective affinities between the criticisms made by CEPAL economists concerning the distributive effects of economic policies and the social concerns arising from the Church's social doctrine. The work also revealed a significant heterogeneity between the theoretical and professional styles of the Commission's economists, manifested in the coexistence of a generation associated with the classical structuralist economic ideas and another, increasingly influential, that emerged in the process of Americanization of economics in Latin America. This heterogeneity was expressed in different positions regarding traditional structuralist thought and the dictatorship's neoliberal policies. Finally, the influence of the Chilean context on CEPAL ultimately changed its face. Its economists, especially those of the new generation, developed an intellectual and political sociability with the think tank CIEPLAN, which not only served as a form of opposition to the regime but also stimulated the institution's reflection and learning about neoliberal policies, becoming one of the sources for the emergence of neostructuralism in the late 1980s.