When domestic funds did not suffice to keep the model afloat, transnational corporations pitched in, creating unprecedented international networks of corruption as the recently unveiled Odebrecht scheme reveals.

Empresarios weaponized national credit ratings and turned Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s into transnational mechanisms of economic austerity and political control. Behind closed doors, empresarios provided seemingly unlimited resources for political campaigns, shutting down any expression of economic deviation with messages of international sanctions and stagnation. Under the control of empresarios representing private and foreign capital, the presidency turned into a position limited to “protecting the model” at any cost. Far from hiding these endorsements and their sketchy “contributions,” empresarios like Peruvian Roque Benavides, Ecuadorian Guillermo Lasso, or Chilean Andrónico Luksic participate in the public debate, presenting themselves as economic and political pundits or, as it is the case of tycoon and major tax-evader Sebastián Piñera, holding office. Every political candidate who attempted to hold office at every level of the state administration, regardless of their affiliation, needed to please empresarios and receive either their explicit approval or their implicit acceptance-often wrapped up with hundreds of thousands of US dollars. The Confederación de la Producción y el Comercio (CPC) in Chile, the Confederación de Empresarios Privados de Bolivia (CEPB), the Comité Empesarial Ecuatoriano (CEE) in Ecuador, and the Confederación Nacional de Instituciones Empresariales Privadas (CONFIEP) in Peru renewed, in the dawn of the twenty-first century, the role of capitalists as the most powerful political agents of their countries-true Washington Consensus warriors. Having entrepreneurs and businessmen- empresarios-dictating Andean politics produced a fairly obvious result: repúblicas empresariales, or state structures of power and production almost completely seized by corporate private interests. In Peru, every post-Fujimori administration, even the potentially transformative terms of Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) and Ollanta Humala (2011-2016) left expanding inequalities and socioeconomic poverties largely unaddressed.

In Bolivia, the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario-once protagonist of a major social transformation-became the political platform of and advocate for the privatization of public services. In Ecuador, the constitutional sanction of a “social market economy” in the Montecristi document of 2008 produced an enduring tension between private corporations and civil society, often resolved in favor of a powerful few. Claiming to be both exemplary economic leaders and, in some cases, the embodiment of the redeeming miracle of progress, a new Andean plutocracy emerged and consolidated around the “preservation of the model.” In post-dictatorship Chile, no political party dared to question the constitutionally protected economic model left behind by Pinochet, the military, and right-wing civilian technocrats. Once military juntas and civilian autocrats finalized the first stages of structural adjustments, businessmen and entrepreneurs seized control of neoliberalizing Andean republics. At the core of this wave of Andean unrest, protesters are revolting against their recent histories. Within the past months and weeks, we have been witnessing powerful episodes of contestation against such enduring abjections: anticorruption protests in Peru, Indigenous mobilization in Ecuador, grassroots resistance in Bolivia, and-remarkably-a generalized sense of social dissent in Chile. Andean poverty, ultimately, became a synonym of existence and a quest for survival beyond the margins.

Those who survived annihilation faced decades of material and social impoverishment, becoming subject to the worst perils of market-based ideologies and right-wing fundamentalism, all carefully embellished with Catholic-framed narratives of sacrifice and virtuous suffering. In the name of market and economic growth, each of these states repressed, killed, and disappeared dissidents, making human rights violations the first truly transnational feature of these countries. Beginning with Augusto Pinochet’s coup in 1973 and ending with Alberto Fujimori’s authoritarian turn in 1992, the structural adjustments in Chile (1973-1990), Ecuador (1984-2002), Bolivia (1985-2006), and Peru (1990-2000) showcased the darkest aspects of capitalist transformations. Military coups, bureaucratic authoritarianism, and the politics of anti-politics-an autocratic mode of governance based on the obliteration of political participation-brought neoliberalism to the central Andean region.

Plutocracy countries 2021