the“Chicago Boys”; they played a crucial role in Augusto Pinochet policies. The so-called Washington Consensus supported the neoliberal policies of struc­tural adjustment in Latin America that were implemented by the IMF and the World Bank(Williamson, 1990). In the 1980s, the IMF and the World Bank—hereinafter WB—began to condition structural adjustment loans to pension reform(i.e., in Costa Rica and Uruguay), becoming powerful external actors in several heavily indebted Latin American countries. In 1994, the WB(1994), headed by Estelle James, published a report on the problems of public pension systems worldwide, aggravated by aging, with policy recommendations aimed at multi-pillar systems that led to privat­ization. 1 That same year I published my first book that compared the structural pension reforms in Latin America, examining their assumptions and, in 1996­2000, I published five other works contrasting the position of international organizations in the debate—WB-IMF versus ILO-ECLAC—, comparing the characteristics of private pension systems in the region, identifying their flaws, evaluating their performance, and measuring the high costs of the transition and the fiscal burden(Mesa-Lago, 1994, 1996, 1998a, 1998b, 2000a). In 2001, Peter Orszag and Joseph E. Stiglitz(2001)—the latter received the Nobel Prize in Economics that year—identified ten“myths” in the public discussion on the benefits of privatization, which“had not been validated neither in theory nor in practice”; based on these myths, they developed a series of theoretical hypotheses that tore them down(p. 18, 42). Around the same time, the London School of Economics social welfare expert Nicholas Barr(2000), in an IMF paper, analyzed“myths, truths, and policy options” on pension reforms. In 2001, the WB published a book reproducing the above-mentioned essay by Orszag and Stiglitz, followed by a critical review by various Bank officials(including James) and by pro-privatization experts; only Peter Diamond—Nobel Prize in Economics in 2010—disagreed with the 1 Although the WB tried to apply the Chilean model and succeeded in several countries, others refused and introduced variants, as explained later. 15