Wasn’t Allende’s presidency an economic ruin?
On the contrary, the most important part of Allende’s legacy is precisely the least known: his innovative, disruptive and democratizing commitment to new technologies and the cyber management of the economy.
Were not their nationalizations of multinationals an economic ruin?
If you study that period, you will see that his Cybersyn project managed to create and manage with an efficient and revolutionary computer system those companies.
And nothing remained of that modernizing attempt?
If the CIA and Pinochet had not overthrown and killed him with a military coup against democracy 50 years ago, Chile would be a high tech mecca today, like Japan, South Korea or Taiwan.
Why are you so sure?
We have investigated it thoroughly and what Pinochet did, after defenestration of Allende, was precisely to abort that incipient technological take-off and replace it with the ultra-liberal ideology of the so-called Chicago Boys, from the University of Chicago, who reoriented the country towards to the economic right and the free market.
Why does it seem so relevant to Allende?
Because it shows that there was an alternative in the world in Silicon Valley and that the CIA aborted it, but it is still possible: Allende in the 70s was building semiconductor factories in Africa. That’s why I’m talking about those engineers, the Santiago Boys, as an alternative to the Chicago Boys.
What does your research show?
Look at South Korea, Taiwan, even Germany… All these states played a leading role by investing in a technological infrastructure that later allowed their large technological and export industries to take off.
Most of those states, like China today, were authoritarian.
And Chile, on the other hand, was a democracy and Allende, a social democrat…
But the CIA didn’t seem to make distinctions.
Not in the middle of the cold war. But if they had allowed Allende’s project to flourish, today Latin America would be fairer and richer and Chile, an alternative technological power, because a model of technological development is possible that is not only that of Silicon Valley and the ego of Elon Musk .
Well, his model dominates the world today.
But there is an alternative of technological social democracy, even though in Silicon Valley they say that they are the only innovators, the anti-state entrepreneurs, and that the rest is boring bureaucracy. And in The Santiago Boys, I think I demonstrate that Xileamb Allende had the software, the talent and the ideas to transform into a democratic Taiwan in South America.
What was Allende’s Cybersyn like?
Even under the CIA blockade, US sanctions, and pressure from Nixon and Kissinger, it functioned as a fantastic computer system capable of proving that it was not just being innovated in California. It was so efficient that in the 70s many thought when they heard about it that it was just fake news.
When it comes to states innovating, they have never had as much power as they do today.
What these states are doing today is channeling funds towards private initiatives and start-ups, many of them foreign. When Pedro Sánchez receives Sam Altman, pioneer of artificial intelligence, he only tries to attract investments from the United States…
Don’t you think this is your mission?
What the State is doing like this is only creating markets for a handful of multinationals and not infrastructure so that Spanish entrepreneurs in artificial intelligence can progress. And I know them and they are very good, but without state support.
Can there be employment without foreign investment? Globalization is not to prosper?
Opening the Spanish market to these technologies, instead of Pedro Sánchez, could be done by Goldman Sachs or McKinsey. And that’s why I claim Allende’s Cybersyn, because they didn’t let it last more than three years, but it was already a democratic path – remember that in his Chile there was full democracy – and not just a market one.
Is technology today’s ideology?
It might as well have been just progress and they didn’t let it be. Allende shows that already in the 70s the big technological multinationals were doing pure geopolitics and that they were spying and interfering in favor of their interests, as the ITT did in Latin America.
Who are the ITTs of today?
When it is not the citizens and their democracies who innovate in technology that control the networks, they end up spying on you, stealing from you, they keep your copyrights, your chances to prosper and turn you into their serf.
