CNBC: "Happy Birthday Milton Friedman!" Verbatim.

Shortly after Salvador Allende was elected president, but before he assumed office, then-CIA-director Richard Helms met with President Richard Nixon and discussed the situation in Chile. Helms' notes from his September 15, 1970 meeting contain the indication: "Make the economy scream." A week later Ambassador Edward Korry reported telling outgoing Chilean president Eduardo Frei Montalva, through his Defense Minister, that "not a nut or bolt would be allowed to reach Chile under Allende." By late 1972, the Chilean Ministry of the Economy estimated that almost one-third of the diesel trucks at Chuquicamata Copper Mine, 30 percent of the privately owned city buses, 21 percent of all taxis, and 33 percent of state-owned buses in Chile could not operate because of the lack of spare parts or tires. In overall terms, the value of United States machinery and transport equipment exported to Chile by U.S. firms declined from $152.6 million in 1970 to $110 million in 1971.[9]:33

Immediately following the Chilean coup of 1973, Augusto Pinochet was made aware of a confidential economic plan known as El ladrillo[10] (literally, “the brick”), so called because the report was “as thick as a brick”. The plan had been quietly prepared in May 1973 [11] by economists who opposed Salvador Allende’s government, with the help from a group of economists the press were calling the Chicago Boys, because they were predominantly alumni of the University of Chicago. The document contained the backbone of what would later on become the Chilean economic policy.[11] According to the 1975 report of a United States Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, the Chilean economic plan was prepared in collaboration with the CIA.[9]:40[12]

The plan recommended a set of economic reforms that included deregulation and privatization. Among others reforms, they made the central bank independent, cut tariffs, privatized the state-controlled pension system,[13] state industries, and banks, and reduced taxes. Pinochet’s stated aim was to “make Chile not a nation of proletarians, but a nation of entrepreneurs”.[7]