Behind, under and around the new right and far right that proliferate in Latin America there is a network of people and institutions that, for decades and from different places, promote a cultural battle impose the ideas of freedomas they themselves advertise them. This is not a plot or a secret conspiracy, but rather a confluence of closely linked civil organizations, foundations and universities dedicated to recruiting and training young people, holding conferences, funding projects, publishing books and magazines and weaving their presence in mass media and virtual spaces. Even if updated, their horizon is always the same: promoting the benefits of the free market, the reduction of states to a minimum, individual development and private property. The creed known today as libertarian.
For years their existence and activities remained out of focus, until they exploded into the foreground: with the arrival of Javier Milei in the Argentine government or with the candidacy of Johannes Kaiser in Chile, to name recent cases.
Foundation for Economic Education, Mont Pèlerin Society, Institute Cato, Atlas Network, Mises Institute, Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) are some of the most prominent entities, founded in Europe and North America. The model was subsequently replicated and exported to the south, for example, with the Center for Studies for Freedom, in Argentina, or the Institute of Business Studies, in Brazil, among many other institutions.
The book is dedicated to revealing the history of this network of organizations, to investigating the protagonists who created it. The owners of freedom. Think tanks, money and cultural battle (South American, 2025), by Argentine journalist Soledad Vallejos.
“When the figure of Milei emerged and began to grow, it seemed to me that there was an under-registered world there,” says Vallejos, in dialogue with EL PAÍS, on the origins of his research. “I began to pay attention to Milei’s environment, to the authors he cited, to the names and foundations that were repeated. Pulling on those threads I found a world that I didn’t know and that wasn’t built overnight, nor in these years, but which had a lot of work behind it.”
The names that Milei repeats most are those of the economists of the so-called Austrian school: Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) and Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), among others. To this pleiad he usually adds what he considers “a local hero” of liberalism, Alberto Benegas Lynch (Buenos Aires, 1940), promoter and precursor, like his father of the same name, of that ideology in Argentina.
The original trace of Vallejos’ libertarian foundations and institutions can be found in the mid-20th century, at the beginning of the Cold War, as a reaction to socialism, Keynesianism, social status of those years.
“In Road to servitude (1944), Hayek writes that any state measure that places limits on individual decision leads immediately to authoritarianism”, he explains. Impressed by the reading, the English businessman Antony Fisher (1915-1988) sought out Hayek and asked him for advice on how to bring those ideas into the field of politics. But the future Nobel Prize winner for economics discouraged him. “He told him to forget politics, that you had to go through the mind, convince, generate content to create a new world”, he says Vallejos. “He told him about a task that would take years and Fisher put his fortune to work on creating the first think tank Free British market.
Thus, in 1955, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) was born and there, years later, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between 1979 and 1990, would be trained. At the same time, the republican Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), admirer of the economist Hans Sennholz (1922-2007), disciple of Von Mises and key trainer, would become president of the United States. of the new liberal generations at the exclusive, conservative and Christian Grove City College. In 1981, Fisher created the powerful global Atlas network. Those were the times when these ideas resurfaced under the label of neoliberalismsomething that many of his cultists today deny.
Vallejos’ book pursues the initiatives and protagonists who, from those origins, expanded the ideology towards Latin America. “The very logic of the liberal libertarian world is transnational,” observes the author. “It doesn’t work in a closed space. (Their leaders) constantly exchange ideas, proposals, learn a lot from each other. There are narratives that are repeated, but not copied, but applied with local idiosyncrasy in different countries.”
The pioneering Mont Pèlerin Society, launched by Hayek in 1947, spread its tentacles into Latin America two decades later: first to Venezuela, then to Guatemala. The Atlas network would do this into the 1980s, until it was deployed from Mexico to South America. In the case of Argentina, the first importation of the model is earlier, and dates back to 1957, when Benegas Lynch (father) created the Center for the Diffusion of the Free Economy. Since then there have been numerous related institutions and others born from internal divisions and disputes, with expressions in study centers and political groups. In the mid-1970s, Benegas Lynch (son) founded the Higher School of Economics and Business Administration (ESADE), which distinguished Javier Milei as a doctor. honor cause. For now, perhaps the last exponent of the saga is the Faro Foundation, chaired by the writer Agustín Laje.
Unlike many leaders, legislators and officials of the new libertarian groups – “who grew up in the universe of foundations,” says Vallejos – Milei is almost a newcomer the ideas.
“In 2014 Milei read a text by Rothbard and was fascinated by it.” It was his baptism in the Austrian school. Looking for more books, he went to the Buenos Aires bookstore of the Spanish group Unión Editorial, which is part of the network of liberal organizations. “Through the door of that bookshop, Milei enters the world of fundamentals,” says the author of The owners of freedom. “He started giving speeches and lectures, more and more people started arriving.” The periodic and strident appearances on TV broaden his fame, which is multiplied on social networks. “And at a certain point, the different tribes of liberalism began to close ranks around him. They saw in him a great communicator, which was one of their weaknesses.” Less than a decade later, Milei entered the Casa Rosada and became, in his words, “the first liberal-libertarian president in history.”
