Chile is the birthplace of neoliberalism in Latin America. A group of rightwing economists, the so-called Chicago boys, convinced Pinochet to abandon the state-led developmental model that had been dominant in the country since the early 1930s. Instead, they began to apply in April 1975 an orthodox neoliberal model based on free market principles. By this, Chile pioneered the adoption of neoliberal policies in Latin America and the Western world as it preceded the emergence of Thatcherism and Reaganomics in the Northern hemisphere. Neoliberal rule deeply reshaped Chilean society, leading to a fast process of capitalist modernization and cultural transformation. The neoliberal model survived the end of military rule in 1990 and still plays a pivotal role in the Chilean economy today. This study aims to explain the remarkable longevity and relative strength that has characterized neoliberalism in Chile. The neoliberal model has been seriously challenged by the October revolt in 2019 and by the leftwing government led by Gabriel Boric since March 2022. But despite attempts to dismantle it, the neoliberal model has proved to have taken deep roots in Chilean society.

Whether the model of the neoliberal state is conceived in terms of the history of ideas or political economy, a specific reorganization of fiscal relations is always at the center of the debate. The neoliberalization of the state is supposed to be achieved through the containment of inflation and public debt, the reallocation of the declining tax burden to consumption, and the creation of economic competitiveness through low-income, corporate, and capital gains taxes. Although the Spanish state has pursued neoliberal policies in various areas since the 1990s, its tax policy has always been at odds with neoliberal ideas. Instead, and in contrast to developments in Latin America, its political elites never abandoned the idea of progressive taxation. Moreover, they have been guided by the European model of the tax state, whose two pillars, VAT and progressive income taxation, have never been touched in principle. The concept of neoliberalism, therefore, suggests a problematic interpretation of the Spanish state’s recent history. This finding presents us with a critical choice: Either neoliberalism is not deeply attached to specific tax policies, or the narratives of neoliberalization, which have nevertheless become popular, fail to capture its history.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, globalization, technological changes, and neoliberal reforms weakened labor organizations in Latin America and beyond. In this context, scholars not only documented labor union decline but also suggested that historical differences between formal-sector insiders (e.g., salaried workers) and outsiders (e.g., informal sector, rural, and unemployed workers) would deepen. However, unexpected alliances between labor unions representing insiders and social movements representing outsiders have since formed in a number of countries. Some of these alliances have crystallized into new national labor federations or overarching associations, which I call insider-outsider coalitions. I argue that these coalitions emerge in the context of major political or economic threats affecting labor movements. When labor movements split in response to such threats, defecting labor unions seek outsider allies. Coalition formation succeeds when defecting unions are strong and there are existing networks or organizations among outsiders. The chapter illustrates the argument of insider-outsider coalition formation in the case of Argentina.

A voluminous literature has explored the origins and consequences of neoliberal public policy. However, the question of whether scholars can identify a distinctly neoliberal state formation remains under discussion. This introductory chapter begins to offer an answer by first describing neoliberal reforms throughout Latin America, challenging conventional understandings of the period. For example, while the region did see a turn toward export-driven growth, the retrenchment in state spending often associated with neoliberalism did not occur. The chapter continues by providing brief case studies describing how neoliberal policies were implemented within individual countries, underscoring the difficulty of speaking of a regional model of neoliberal reform. The chapter then turns to the question of state capacity by introducing the four dimensions of state power that provide the organizing framework for the remaining chapters of the volume: economic, territorial, infrastructural, and symbolic power. Following a series of brief synopses of the individual chapters contained within the present volume, the introductory chapter concludes by suggesting that while there were general regional patterns in terms of policy, each individual state remained “neoliberal” in its own idiosyncratic way.

This chapter argues that successive institutional modernizations since 1990 in Chile have reconfigured the neoliberal state into an “enabling” form that preserved and entrenched the centrality and fundamental role of the market and the decentralization of social responsibility to the municipal level. The municipalization of primary health care, education, and social assistance embedded by the architects of the “subsidiary” neoliberal state, and defended in terms of greater efficiency in the delivery and quality of those public goods, was legitimized in moral-political terms. The institutional modernizations of the past three decades have been legitimated as “enabling” subjects, as gender-neutral citizens, to bear responsibility for their own well-being. They aim to resolve the fundamental contradiction between, on the one hand, the needs of a rapidly globalizing and diversifying the resource-based capitalist economy, and, on the other hand, the social reproductive activities on which that economy necessarily relies. A gendered approach reveals that women play a fundamental role in materializing the moral vision of this embodied, gendered, “enabling” state form. It shows that while women’s work provides the major share of private and social provisioning, their efforts remain largely invisible and undervalued.

Evidence from Indigenous organizing in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile offers useful illustrations of the ways in which Indigenous peoples have challenged (and been challenged by) neoliberalism and settler colonial orders. While there are sound reasons to say that Indigenous movements have been “stronger” in Bolivia and Ecuador than in Chile, I make the more modest claim that all three countries provide useful ways to think about the longue durée of colonial entanglements in Latin America. Viewing neoliberalism through the lenses of Settler Colonial Studies and Indigenous Studies offers two different ways of situating the central concern of this volume. First, it provides an alternative timescale, one that situates neoliberalism not only within the twentieth and twenty-first-century swing of statist and market-based development models, but within a longer colonial history of extractivism, state formation, and Indigenous struggles. Second, it considers the politics of neoliberalism as both an enabling condition of Indigenous mobilization and demobilization. Neoliberalism, from the vantage point of Indigenous Studies, is part of an ongoing story of colonial dispossession, anti-colonial resistance, and negotiation.

Spain, and Europe more generally, has long been regarded as an epicenter of regionalism and secessionism, while Latin America is usually portrayed as lacking comparable movements. This chapter takes a different approach. First, applying the concept of territorial autonomy movements, it pursues a cross-regional comparison of Santa Cruz in Bolivia, Guayas in Ecuador, and Catalonia in Spain. The chapter shows that autonomy movements across the Iberian world are strikingly similar with regards to their core claims, diagnostic frames, and tactics. The chapter draws on social movement theory, secondly, to account for the recent intensification of territorial autonomy mobilizations in the three cases under discussion. We argue that in all three cases, (1) transformations of center-region relations triggered territorial grievances; (2) dense associational networks and new alliances with local state representatives enhanced organizational resources, while (3) broader anti-neoliberal protest cycles and their concern with direct democracy and/or multicultural group rights provided territorial challengers with new ways to assign meaning to and justify their demands. Finally, the chapter also engages with the broader theme of the volume and places territorial autonomy movements in the context of the neoliberal state and wider anti-neoliberal protests in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Spain.

This tentative excursion into the risky terrain of contemporary history seeks to explain the neoliberal turn which substantially transformed Mexico’s political economy, c. 1980–2000. It considers how and why that transformation took place, assessing domestic, as against international, causes; the role of reactive – compared to proactive – policymaking; and the contentious connection between economic reform and political democratization (which Mexico also experienced). It describes the peculiar regime that prevailed in Mexico pre-1980; a regime that arguably made incremental reform more feasible and less socially disruptive. The chapter charts how successive economic crises, through the 1980s and early 1990s, prompted neoliberal reform while constraining its positive results and contributing to the decline of PRI. Initially, “reactive” neoliberalism gave way – with Salinas – to ambitious “proactive” technocratic reform, which transformed the Mexican economy (by way of trade liberalization, privatizations, state-shrinking, and – crucially – the creation of NAFTA), while also affecting broader areas of policy, such as land tenure, education, Church-State relations and social provision (the contentious “Solidarity” program). Politically, while the PRI survived, it faced declining legitimacy and growing opposition from both Left and Right, which presaged its final fall from power in 2000.

This chapter takes the case of Conditional Cash Transfer programs (CCTs) as an invitation to examine a trade-off faced by many Latin American neoliberal states: Their promise of making states both more efficient and more inclusive. More specifically, I use the case of CCTs to explore variations in how the Brazilian and Mexican states understood and acted on the promise of increasing inclusivity in official safety nets by making poverty management more efficient. I argue that while Brazil and Mexico equally chose CCTs as their main strategy to reinvent social policy provision for low-income families in a neoliberal era, they did so for different reasons, which resulted in the implementation of programs that followed distinct operational logic. In Mexico, the state invested in a very precise regime to select and monitor low-income families, while Brazil adopted a looser strategy. These differences depended on the strategies of legitimation of each CCT and were influenced by the distinct approaches to neoliberalism adopted by each country. My findings are based on analyzing a rich set of qualitative data, including the study of official documents and 100 in-depth interviews with political and bureaucratic elites in the two countries.

Post-neoliberalism opened up new possibilities for understanding the end game of social policy in Latin America. As a political-economic project, it promised to uphold the dignity of all citizens in the face of markets and a transformation in the values that underpin the management of national assets and new, socially responsible economies. As a social project, it linked social policy to improvements in citizen inclusion, both distributive and political. Inevitably, the extent to which post-neoliberalism has delivered has fallen short. In this chapter, we identify the challenges to the project of welfare provision as transformation, inclusion, and citizenship under new left regimes in the early twenty-first century. We argue that, despite changes to labor markets and some innovative social programs, social policies were grafted onto existing political economies and social relations. The new approach failed to generate commitment from across society to a new “end game” for the social policy or a political economy of long-term transformation based on equitable growth, job creation, and market regulation, and, as such, it did not provide a sustainable response to the structural determinants of poverty and persistent inequalities in Latin America.

Homicidal ecologies are prevalent in the northern triangle of Central America, Guatemala included. This chapter contends that even with the temporal convergence of neoliberal reforms, democratization, and civil war accords, it is the persistence of historical structural factors that explain the persistence of corrupt and complicit law and order institutions that both allowed illicit organizations to thrive and failed to guarantee citizens’ basic liberal right to be free from harm. Indeed, the failure to radically change the police, the military, and the courts at the time of the peace accords has left citizens without safeguards, leading many to flee north.

Chile and Peru underwent ambitious neoliberal reforms in the early 1980s and mid-1990s that had many similarities in their design and goals. Their university systems were no exception. Both countries’ higher education reforms stressed the proliferation of private institutions and market competition as a solution for the alleged shortcomings of public higher education. Despite these similarities, the two reform projects also had many differences, leading to distinct outcomes and grievances in recent times. While Chile placed more emphasis on reforming both public and private universities based on neoliberal models and allocated state-sponsored student loans, in Peru, the reform left the public system untouched and did not create incentives for student recruitment in private higher education. These divergent paths, we argue, explain the different backlashes against the shortcomings of these neoliberal reforms. While the Chilean counter-reform is characterized by a bottom-up process that aims to bring back the state and guarantee more equality in the higher education system, in Peru, the top-down reform focuses on creating and strengthening regulatory institutions to ameliorate low-quality education. In both cases, neoliberal policy feedback processes enlighten why the outcomes are very much still part of the neoliberal framework.