The Rule of Private Initiative in Development: An Institutional Legacy of Peruvian Neoliberalism (1960–1970)

This article examines Peruvian neoliberalism in the 1960s as a distinctive iteration of the so-called “positive program” of neoliberal development. While previous scholarship has associated this program primarily with members of the Mont Pèlerin Society in the 1950s and with the institutional proposals advanced by business elites within the Inter-American Council of Commerce and Production, neoliberal development thought has often been portrayed as fundamentally opposed to industrialization, planning, and land reform—policies later promoted by the US Alliance for Progress. In contrast, this study demonstrates how Peruvian neoliberals appropriated and reshaped these very policies in support of private enterprise. It introduces the concept of “neoliberal developmentalism” to describe this project, linking it to the notion of “private initiative” as articulated by Peruvian neoliberals under the influence of ordoliberalism (social market economy), the agenda of the Inter-American Council of Commerce and Production, and conservative Catholicism. These interventions gave rise to what neoliberals termed “democratic planning” in support of the Alliance for Progress. Drawing on previously overlooked archival sources, the article reconstructs the heterogeneous network of actors and institutions involved in this process, including the Swiss-Peruvian businessmen Max Reiser and Carlos Mariotti; the economists Pedro Beltrán and Rómulo Ferrero; and their connections to Mont Pèlerin Society members Wilhelm Röpke and Albert Hunold. It further highlights the role of business associations linked to the Inter-American Council of Commerce and Production, higher education institutions, and civil society organizations in institutionalizing this neoliberal development agenda, thereby challenging the assumption that Latin American neoliberals categorically rejected state-led reform.