THE INTERNATIONAL DISSEMINATION OF CHILEAN PENSION REFORM AND THE ULTRALIBERALISM OF THE BOLSONARO GOVERNMENT

INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AND ENTREPRENEURS

Abstract

The pension reform engendered by the Bolsonaro government in 2019 is clearly and openly inspired by the paradigmatic reform promoted in Chile by the Pinochet government in the early 1980s. The Chilean reform, based on individual capitalization managed by private financial institutions, replaced the pension system. division in the country and became the main reference to guide the countless pension reforms that, in the following decades, would be carried out around the globe. As a central element of the neoliberal reformist consensuses that became hegemonic in the 1980s and 1990s, the privatization of social security, or at least the reduction of state provision, began to be disseminated internationally, as an example to be followed, by a myriad of actors. Among these, international organizations and some individual actors stood out. Individual articulators and negotiators such as these are called “entrepreneurs” by public policy scholars. This work, after analyzing the way in which the international diffusion of the Chilean reform took place, with emphasis on Latin America, intends to discuss the way in which international organizations and entrepreneurs (responsible for both the “export” and the “import” of these ideas and proposals) influenced Bolsonaro’s reform, as well as the different ways in which the idea of ​​Chile as a “model” guided discussions on the subject.