Brazil's new Economy Minister Paulo Guedes worked in Chile 40 years ago after earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago, giving him a front-row seat to dictator Augusto Pinochet's economic shock treatment.
Even as Pinochet's authoritarian regime left a brutal human rights legacy — responsible for the execution of more than 3,000 leftist opponents and the torture of over 40,000 more — it drew praise from some at home and abroad for handing carte blanche to a team of economists trained by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman.
By pursuing free market solutions such as privatizing state companies and pulling down trade barriers, the "Chicago Boys" — as they were known — laid the basis for turning a poor country into Latin America's most successful economy by most indicators.