Wasn't Allende's presidency an economic ruin?
On the contrary, the most important of Allende's legacy is precisely what is less known: his innovative, disruptive and democratizing commitment to new technologies and the cybernetic management of the Chilean economy and companies.
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 these companies with an efficient and revolutionary computer system.
And nothing remained of that modernizing attempt?
If the CIA and Pinochet had not brought him down with a military coup against democracy 50 years ago now, Chile would be a high-tech mecca today, like Japan, South Korea or Taiwan.
Why are you so sure?
We have investigated it in depth and what Pinochet did, after ousting Allende, was precisely to abort that incipient technological takeoff and replace it with the ultraliberal ideology of the so-called Chicago Boys, from the University of Chicago, who reoriented the country towards the economic right and the free market.
Why does Allende seem relevant to you?
Because it shows that there was an alternative in the world to 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 his engineers, the Santiago Boys, as an alternative to the Chicago Boys.
What does your research show?
Look at South Korea, Taiwan, even Germany… All of these states played a leading role in 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 any distinctions.
Not in the middle of the cold war. But if they had allowed Allende's project to prosper, today Latin America would be fairer and richer and Chile, an alternative technological power; because a model of technological development is possible, which is not only that of Silicon Valley and that of the Elon Musk ego.
Well, that model today dominates the world.
But there is an alternative of technological social democracy, although 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 show that Chile with Allende had the software, the talent and the ideas to become a democratic Taiwan in South America.
What was that Cybersyn de Allende like?
Even under CIA blockade, US sanctions, and pressure from Nixon and Kissinger, it worked like a fantastic computer system capable of demonstrating that it wasn't just California that was innovating. He was so efficient that in the 70s many thought when they heard about him that they were 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 to private initiatives and startups, many of which are foreign. When Pedro Sánchez receives Sam Altman, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, he only tries to attract US investment...
Don't you think that's your mission?
What the State does like this is only creating markets for a handful of multinationals and not infrastructures for Spanish entrepreneurs in artificial intelligence to progress. And I know them and they are very good, but without state support.
Without foreign investment can there be employment? Going global is not prospering?
Opening the Spanish market to these technology companies instead of Pedro Sánchez could be done by Goldman Sachs or McKinsey. That is why I vindicate Allende's Cybersyn, because they did not let it last more than three years, but it was already a democratic technological path –remember that in Chile there was full democracy– and not only of the market.
Is technology the ideology of today?
It could also be just progress and they didn't let you. Allende shows that already in the 70s the big technological multinationals carried out pure geopolitics and that they spied and interfered in favor of their interests, as the ITT did in Latin America.
Who are the ITT of our days?
When the citizens and their democracies are not the ones who innovate, those who do invent and control the networks end up spying on you, stealing from you, keeping your copyrights and your chances of prospering and making you their servant.
