Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

  Ford also continued financial support to Catholic’s neoliberal agricultural economists. The latter were reportedly “euphoric” at news of the military coup: two department members—Juan Carlos Mendez and Rodrigo Mujica, “had participated in the preparation of an economic plan which was subsequently adopted by the Junta.” A Ford report also noted that “the initial impulse of several of the staff members was to lend their personal and professional support, formally and informally, to governmental policy-making and administrative functions.”105 There was no thought among the economists about the levels of repression and “losses of lives” that occurred after the coup, just the opportunities to influence policy. As a Ford report put it, the agricultural economists “are taking a definitely constructive attitude.”106

  Despite knowledge of the role of several Catholic University economists in precoup economic planning for military rule, Ford officials took what may only be described as an avuncular, indulgent line: Norman Collins of Ford expressed “strong concern… about the dangers… of their becoming involved, as university professors [but not in their ‘individual capacity’], in policy-making and advisory activities.” Collins continued, “it appeared to me that the group had not given sufficient attention to the difficulty, even impossibility, of maintaining their position as independent analysts and critics of policies and programs they would be designing and implementing.” Collins believed that his warnings changed the economists’ behavior and that “the prospects appear reasonably bright that the Department of Agricultural Economics can continue to offer a high-quality graduate program,” and he recommended that a further $26,000 be transferred to the department.107 Another report argued that Catholic University economists were still leaving for government and not being replaced, which was “clearly symptomatic of the current government’s vision of the social role of the university: an institution fully integrated into and at the service of government.” Later, the same report argues that the department “might end up becoming a vassal of government” with no “freedom of thought and independence of criticism.” As early as November 1973, then, almost the entire staff of the department had been “drawn into assisting their colleagues who have taken full-time or advisory positions in government.” The relationship between the Department of Agricultural Economics and the Chilean state constituted the subsidization of the state by the university, as the latter had to continue to pay the salaries of academics whose governmental posts were yet to be formalized and, thereafter, pay the differential between the government and academic incomes. The military regime was also funding increasing numbers of its staff to study economics in the department, as they envisaged being in power “for quite a while,” according to Professor Fernando Martinez, the director of the graduate program. At the same time, replacement economists being sought by the department were uniformly right wing, with thought for neither “disciplinary nor ideological breadth.”108

  Yet in March 1974, Peter Bell wrote to Fernandez about the necessity to ensure that the department maintain its “academic independence from government [and] a reasonable degree of pluralism among staff and students.”109 Further recommendations for making grant payments were made in March 1974 and every quarter until 1977, despite the fact that each report noted the department’s domination by the military regime.110 Ford’s attachment to its academic-institutional investments was evidently very strong. But, as Puryear noted in 1978, the foundation “learned something of the limits of outside assistance in counterbalancing institutional and national problems.”111

  CENTER FOR NATIONAL PLANNING STUDIES (CEPLAN)

  CEPLAN was founded in 1968 at Catholic University, funded by Ford. However, CEPLAN’s director, Alejandro Foxley, had already been associated with Ford through the MIT-ODEPLAN project, funded to the tune of $440,000.112 From the time Allende was installed as president, CEPLAN economists generally sought to play an “intellectual” role “among professionals and scholars” to produce future policy recommendations. They were critical of both Allende’s statism, particularly of his income-redistribution programs,113 and of the Chicago boys’ neoliberalism. Key members of CEPLAN included Oscar Munoz (Ph.D., Yale) and Ricardo Ffrench-Davis (PhD., Chicago). This group was especially strong at using quantitative data from government sources to evaluate past policies and in projecting “future alternatives.” Their work, as opposed to that of the other economists at Catholic University, was “founded in Chilean reality.”114

  According to John Strasma, CEPLAN’s members were uniformly linked with the Christian Democratic Party and were generally very good economists “experienced in government” with “quantitative skills in social sciences.” Foxley openly declared that any attempt at broadening the political affiliations of CEPLAN members would be “pernicious” and likely to “sabotage productivity.”115 In that regard, Foxley in no way differed from other groups of economists on the right or left. Of all the groups funded by Ford, CEPLANistas came closest to Ford’s ideal: “moderate” and technocratic.116

  Immediately after the military coup, CEPLAN seemed little affected, despite the fears of one of its members, Oscar Munoz, that he might be dismissed for being of the “independent left” though critical of Allende—and the torture of one of its researchers.117 CEPLAN members continued their work but dropped projects on income redistribution and trade unions in the copper industry. CEPLAN was also “more discreet in the use of its language, and perhaps in the selection of topics which it treats… [to] diffuse [sic] some of the political sensitivity of its research in domestic circles.” CEPLAN also focused on “technical issues… and [placed] less emphasis on issues like labor participation.”118 Nevertheless, Foxley adjudged that the situation at Catholic was deteriorating, as right wingers gradually took control of the upper echelons of the university administration and narrowed room for independent thought. In early 1976, CEPLAN members, forbidden to teach in graduate programs, began discussions about its future with Ford, the UN Development Program, and the International Labor Organization. In mid-1976, CEPLAN was dissolved and, with a Ford grant of $265,000, established CIEPLAN, a new independent research center, with a promise of continued future funding.119 CEPLAN had built an international reputation for excellence based on Ford-funded research, publications, doctoral training, and professional exchange programs. As a result, the group’s professionalism had improved, and their theoretical and methodological techniques had sharpened. They had been extraordinarily productive for a small group (totaling never more than twelve), producing thirty-eight research papers and four books by April 1974. At that date, there were a further twenty-one projects underway, promising seven books and many more articles. According to Puryear, CEPLAN was a highly productive, well-organized, and “closely-knit group,” a center of attraction for the whole region.120

  UNIVERSITY OF CHILE ECONOMISTS

  The coup’s immediate consequences for Chile’s left-wing and (later) centrist economists were dire: mass dismissal, arrest, exile, and stigmatization. Peter Bell estimated that the military regime would force out of the universities by the end of 1973 around 10 percent of students and faculty for political reasons. At the University of Chile, forty-four of forty-seven members of the Department of Political Economy had already been dismissed or suspended. Around “one-third of the Marxist population [of the universities] will have been removed” by the initial wave of repression, Bell added, while the remainder “will be circumscribed in what they teach, research, and publish…. The universities will be more technical than scientific, more technocratic than critical.”121 As Nita Manitzas, a Ford official in Santiago, put it: “our agricultural economists are sitting in the Junta and the sociologists are getting wiped out in the stadium.”122 Despite the great faith placed in social science, no one appeared to predict a military coup. Chile was thought to be immune to such an outcome, except by the military, the business community, and its collaborators among the neoliberal economists at Catholic University. Ford’s Peter Bell had also suggeste
d that a military coup was out of the question.

  Shock within the Ford Foundation led to a serious bout of soul searching, the contours of which are instructive. The contrast with Ford reactions to the even bloodier military takeover in Indonesia in the 1960s, described as a “moderate military regime” by Ford officials, is stark. In Chile, there was expressed deep concern for human-rights violations and the extirpation of civil liberties. Officials even suggested that President McGeorge Bundy use his contacts to ask for Secretary of State Kissinger’s direct intervention in some cases. This simply did not happen in Indonesia in 1965–1966, a country that was described, it will be recalled, as being in a holiday mood following Sukarno’s ousting from office. What led to the deep sense of loss in Chile following the coup? And to what did the soul searching lead?

  Ford’s sense of loss requires some context. An important aspect of it was captured by Osvaldo Sunkel’s wry comment that “when an imperialist power begins to have difficulty, it begins to study itself.” The United States at the end of 1973 was experiencing “difficulties”: the oil crisis, the debacle in Vietnam in general and as pointed up by the Pentagon Papers, and corruption at the very pinnacle of power exposed by the Watergate scandal and subsequent resignation of President Richard Nixon—not to mention a welter of domestic social crises and protests that led to a sense of a “crisis of democracy” and a breakdown of law and order. Additionally, the 1970s brought to an end the optimism of the 1960s as the “development decade” and the hopes pinned on the Alliance for Progress. Poverty, hunger, and social inequality persisted, despite expensive aid programs and huge loans. American liberals motivated to improve the world—to using American power for “good”—were reeling from the realization that their programs had hardly dented the surface of global problems and, even more, that American power might not be so “good” after all.

  In such a context, Ford officials in Latin America, who had seen a recent military coup in Brazil followed by severe repression, were reasonably optimistic about Chile’s prospects. Chile’s democracy was resilient and deeply embedded. More foundation money was invested in Chile, per capita, than in any other country outside the United States.123 Conditions for “success”—meaning a modern, developed, technocratic state—were good. Ford officials described Chile as at a stage of development “comparable to the Rostowian stage of ‘take-off.’”124 The coup, thus, was a shock. It broke apart networks built over two decades of foundation investment. Intellectual freedom—the very cornerstone of independent, critical inquiry—had been crushed in Chile. And it was intellectual freedom in particular that Ford chose to focus on in its responses to the coup: defining the conditions for research and teaching freedom as the basis of whether or not to invest any further funds in extant institutions or in new groupings that were being formed. Yet Ford chose to continue funding economics programs at Catholic University, despite the involvement of many economists there in precoup economic planning and the general support there for the military coup and regime. Ford stressed—as ever—the necessity of apolitical, technocratic research. In the long run, Ford and other American foundations were successful in generating the kind of technocratic outlook that they associated with a modern state. Crisis proved to be a fundamentally important condition of that success.

  HUMAN RIGHTS OR PROTECTING VALUABLE HUMAN ASSETS?

  An internal report by Ford shows that after the military coup, foundation officials chose to focus on “preserving” the “valuable human resources” of which their knowledge networks were constructed.125 Naturally, Ford wanted, during the brutal coup and its repressive aftermath, in which thousands were arrested (approximately 13,000) or killed (approximately 2,700),126 to focus on the academic community it had helped build and thereby preserve “valuable skills.”127 But, according to Puryear, Ford excluded assistance to “confirmed political militants.”128 At the University of Chile alone, at least two thousand academic staff (22 percent of the total) were dismissed.129 Ford chose to grant $500,000 to several of its previously funded organizations to help “rescue” scholars it had funded or who worked in “program-related fields.”130 The aim was to ensure internal and external refugee scholars’ “productive employment” through travel grants, fellowships, or salary-support supplements. The foundation was in “network-preservation” mode. CLACSO, for example, relocated 650 Chilean intellectuals by the autumn of 1974, and LASA and WUS resettled 227 academics in Canada, the United States, and Britain. The report declared that Ford “achieved most of its objectives”:131 the network was saved, bringing “great honor on the Foundation.”132

  Yet according to Ford’s Richard Dye, the tougher decisions were still to be taken concerning the regime in Chile and Ford’s relationship to it, as well as whether to continue operating in the country. Dye argued that the situation in Chile was so repressive, even by March 1974, that it bordered on “the totalitarian,” with a regime “called by history to eradicate the influence of dangerous and subversive intellectual currents embodied in ‘foreign ideologies’ and the ‘social sciences.’” There was a “sustained and comprehensive process underway to purge Chilean institutions of any independent thinking and capacity for autonomous action” directed not just at Marxists but “all the social sciences (except interestingly enough, economics and administration) and groups of left-center and center persuasion as well as the left.” At Catholic University, teaching and research in economics was prevented from criticizing the “capitalist–free enterprise model” and needed to stress its “technocratic” credentials.133

  Kalman Silvert defined Chile as a “totalitarian” state “in which the individual stands naked before the power of the state, unprotected”: no press freedom, the constitution cast aside, no political parties or civil government, intellectual freedom crushed, trade-union leaders “killed, imprisoned, terrorized…. Fright appears to have become an instrument of governmental policy.” Silvert argued that “it is impossible to follow a legal life in contemporary Chile,” and “the Foundation must not be subversive of the regimes within which it operates,” he concluded, heavily implying Ford’s withdrawal from the country.134 Despite this, Dye argued that Ford should remain in Chile to conduct what he called “option-broadening programs,” “maintain… major Foundation grantees,” and to “preserve the Chilean intellectual tradition and the recruitment and training of the next generation of intellectuals,” whether in or outside Chile, “in a private center” or “safe havens.”135 Puryear drew the same conclusion: despite massive repression, “the Foundation’s extensive record of past activity argued against a sudden withdrawal,” and there remained “‘space’… for activities… that were pluralistic in nature.”136 That, indeed, was the position taken by foundation officials.137

  One consequence of the coup—which sits somewhat at odds with the very practical nature of Ford’s immediate responses—was questioning within the foundation itself of the entire paradigm of Rostowian modernization theory. In December 1973, Ford Program Officer Nita Manitzas attacked the “wantonly optimistic” theories that mere American “technical know-how” and economic growth would generate economic development and liberty.138 Such economic determinism, she argued, led to massive investment by Ford in university-based economics throughout Latin America. “The transferability of North American wisdom and technique,” Manitzas argued, “was an article of faith running through much of the Foundation’s program,” including blind faith in assisting “apolitical” planners and the like. Development was one long unbroken story of success: this was wrong, Manitzas contended: “Development” did not adequately feed, house, educate, or clothe people; indeed, “development” exacerbated extant inequalities and began to polarize societies, eroding the “political middle,” as had happened in Chile. The foundation’s backing of economics and other social sciences resulted in “schizophrenic” outcomes: the backing of technocratic economists capable of joining a brutal military regime while turning a blind eye to state violence, alongside a mo
re critical set of sociologists. In the future, Ford needed to take account of this history, Manitzas concluded. By any measure, this was a remarkable critique of the foundation’s programs over two decades across Latin America, if not the world. Yet, it exemplifies the very depth of the crisis within the foundation. Even so, Manitzas was an outlier, a critical and largely ignored keeper of the foundation’s conscience.

  Kalman Silvert agreed: the foundation had believed that “economics is ‘infrastructural,’ the basis of all,” a value-free science at the heart of development and modernization. The coup in Chile and Ford’s subsequent conference on Chile, Silvert argued, forced Ford to accept that knowledge was not value free. But this begged another question: if knowledge is not value free, what should Ford’s values be, and how should they be expressed? Silvert argued that Ford should travel from problem solving to problem “finding”—Ford should in future listen more to locals in defining the problem in the first place and then “turn to helping others ‘find’ the solutions.” This was a significant reconceptualization of the nature of Ford’s “intervention” in Latin America.139 In combination with Manitzas’s arguments above, it indicates a desire on the part of some Ford officers even more deeply and profoundly to intervene in Latin American life.

  At the postcoup Ford conference at which the above arguments were aired, the Socialist Party’s Ricardo Lagos, the former head of economics at the University of Chile, argued for Ford funding to a wider range of organizations, including those without an institutional base because of the military repression. The alternative was that “much of social science in LA [Latin America] may die,” bringing the discussion back to practicalities: what was Ford going to do in postcoup Chile? And this raises an interesting distinction not noted in this book at an earlier stage: that a difference appears between elements of Ford’s own officials—not trustees/officers or New York versus field office, but between trained social scientists and those in more overtly bureaucratic roles. Those of social-scientific backgrounds tended to see the coup and its aftermath far more as an existential problem, invested with far greater meaning and import, while those who may be seen as more “bureaucratic” in orientation tended to see the issue in more practical terms. In the end, though, both Manitzas and Silvert, the social scientists, for all their existential probing, were practical enough to see that ultimately decisions were necessary—they wanted radically to shift the focus, however, to permit local people (though they did not say who those locals might be, and where trained, and in which social-scientific traditions) to take the lead. As Silvert noted, although “you cannot live without a definition of policy,” the question remains: “‘who defines the problems?’ How do we test, express, establish priorities?” Ford was wrong, he argued, to think that creating “technical men” would solve problems. The fact is that “men create reality, not the other way around. It is an error to let the ten problems defined on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times determine what we define as problems.” At the same time, he critiqued the navel gazing underway at Ford: it was too attached to the past. Perhaps the structure and limits on Ford, as noted at the very head of this chapter, were real after all: there were limits on Ford’s internal liberalism that could not cope with the logical extension of some of the arguments advanced by Silvert and Manitzas—a radical shift in power away from Ford as an American organization to one more or less completely in the hands of “locals”: Ford as enabling authentic, locally led development.