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Chilean timber billionaire Eliodoro Matte, ’72, said the free-market ideas and philosophy he learned at Chicago GSB enabled him to change the course of his native country.
Speaking to nearly 800 graduates at the 2008 spring convocation in Hyde Park June 15, Matte said that when he left Chile in 1970 to attend school in Chicago, he was “filled with some of the most painful and hopeless thoughts I’ve ever experienced.” Only ten days before his departure, Salvador Allende had been elected president of Chile.
“There was greater government control and less personal freedom and opposition,” said Matte, chairman of Empresas CMPC, a pulp and paper manufacturing company in Chile.
When he graduated in 1972, Matte was given “a flattering job offer to stay in the U.S.” But he chose to return to Chile, despite the fact that the economy was “in absolute chaos. Inflation was 500 percent a year. People were standing in lines for hours for food that wasn’t there. Yet I returned. But Chicago emboldened me.”
The Allende government was overthrown in 1973 and replaced by a military dictatorship “with no economic philosophy,” according to Matte, who ranks Number 137 on Forbes magazine’s list of world billionaires.
This created an opportunity for Matte and a group of other Chilean-born GSB graduates to shape the future of their nation.
Known as “the Chicago boys,” they believed in “the free market model,” Matte said. “We had a revolutionary doctrine—that a free and competitive market is at the heart of economic development.”
The Chicago boys were able to convince the military junta to implement a free-market system. “There were many ups and downs along the way. Chile went from a decade of stagnation to becoming the most successful economic market in Latin America.”
The Chicago boys also believed that a free market model drives political change. They were right. “In 1989, a Chilean democracy removed the military junta from government,” he said.
Matte said he and graduating students have “a shared heritage of the University of Chicago. The university’s ideas have lifted my life, transformed my country and renewed my family business.”
Matte told students the visit marked the first time he had returned to Chicago since graduating in 1972. “Walking again through the classrooms, I hear the echo of what Chicago ignited in me many years ago. Everything brings back emotions and moving memories.”
Matte said students should value their “precious degree” and urged them to have “the commitment to transform debate and learning into action. I hope your experience at GSB brings you as much reward as it has for me and my family for the past 35 years.”
—Mary Paleologos