In Chile's case, this program was implemented during the 17 years of military dictatorship, without any political or parliamentary opposition, and with the full support of a dictator who murdered 3,200 opponents, arrested and tortured 38,000 people, and forced more than one hundred thousand into exile. Not to mention the fact that, from 1973 to 1985, the military government imposed a daily curfew from 10pm to 6am, for all Chileans, not just a few bearers of electronic ankle tags.

That is, for 12 years, the entire Chilean population was forced to stay in their homes every night as if they were being held in a concentration camp, and, if someone was caught on the street past curfew, they could be arrested without right of appeal, or shot. Despite all this, and despite the opinions of Brazil’s current minister for the economy Paulo Guedes and his cheerleaders in the conservative press, the economic results of Pinochet's neoliberal reforms were absolutely mediocre, and the social consequences were catastrophic.

Before getting into the numbers, it is crucial that readers separate the history of dictatorship between 1973 and 1990 from what happened after the end of dictatorship. Moreover, within the economic history of the dictatorship, it is necessary to distinguish two major periods: the first from 1973 to 1982, and the second from 1982 to 1990.

It was in the first of these two economic periods of dictatorship that Pinochet's Chicago Boys delivered their great neoliberal shock, which culminated in a catastrophic crisis in 1982. It forced the military government to nationalize the Chilean banking system, dismiss the minister of finance, and reverse many of its reforms (for example, regulations were reintroduced in the financial sector and there was a return to the exchange rate policy that had previously been practiced by the Central Bank of Chile).

In 1982, Chilean GDP fell by 13.4%, unemployment reached 19.6%, and 30% of the Chilean population became dependent on social assistance programs that were created ad hoc to deal with the crisis. And yet, four years later, as early as 1986, Chilean GDP per capita was still only $1,525, below the level it had reached in 1973.

By the end of the dictatorship, Chile's average real per capita GDP had grown by only 1.6% per year, a result very close to economic stagnation; 18% of the population was unemployed and 45% below the poverty line. In 1990, Chile’s average GDP per capita, calculated on the basis of purchasing power parity, was only US $4,590, lower than Brazil’s, which at that time, after the “lost decade” of the 1980s, was $6,680. To define this as a "success" is, to say the least, intellectual impudence, if not contemptuous ideological propaganda.

What is also never said by neoliberal economists is that it was only after the end of the dictatorship, in the almost 30-year period from 1990 to 2019, and in particular during the 20 years of the governments of the center-left Concertación, formed by social-democratic parties, Chilean GDP actually grew more significantly: at an average rate of 7% in the 1990s and at 4.6% throughout the rest of the democratic period.

It was during this period that the average income of Chileans increased fivefold, reaching the current level of $25,000, the highest in Latin America, while the GDP reached $455.9 billion in 2017. During this period, the governments of the Concertación promoted several tax reforms that increased the state's social investment, with the creation of universal health insurance, unemployment insurance and the Pilar Solidario, a monthly state benefit for poor pensioners. As a result, the role of the Chilean state has grown again, especially in the development of infrastructure and the provision of social protection, health and education.

When analysts speak of a “Chilean miracle”, they refer to this democratic period, during which center-left governments managed to reduce unemployment left by the dictatorship, from 18% to 6/7% on average, decreasing the population below the poverty line, from 45 percent to 11 percent, and making Chile the highest HDI country in Latin America, and 38th in the world.