In his position as TNI’s general director, Letelier reoriented the institute’s agenda more strongly towards the NIEO. Together with Richard Barnet, Michael Moffitt, and TNI Amsterdam fellow Paresh Chattopadhyay, Letelier developed a new programme, the ‘International Economic Order’ (IEO) project, in which TNI was to take on a central role in facilitating the North-South Dialogue. It was to do this by building a network of like-minded think tanks, international organisations, civil society groups, and national political parties around itself from which it could cultivate and propagate its ideas. This included UN bodies such as the aforementioned CEPAL and UNCTAD, but also the Non-Aligned Movement.
In addition, the IEO programme was to continue the work that had previously been done on multinational corporate monitoring, noting that the structuring of the global economy was not merely the remit of the state but also that of the corporation.9 At the heart of this vision was a commitment to dependency theory and a fierce opposition to the theory of comparative advantage promoted by Keynesian liberals as it related to agricultural production for developing countries, as well as to the free market dogma of the early neoliberals in the Gerald Ford administration.10 In the IEO’s first pamphlet, Moffitt and Letelier set the tone by declaring that it was not enough to simply resolve inequality between nations, but that a new international economic order was necessary to resolve the inequality within nations as well.11
Tragically, however, Letelier’s tenure would end almost as soon as it began. The Chilean secret police assassinated him in September, 1976, also killing Ronni Moffitt, a fellow IPS economist and Michael Moffitt’s wife, in the process.
Letelier’s vision lived on under his successor Howard Wachtel, who was asked by Richard Barnet to take the reigns of the IEO programme.12 A leading economist in the revival of radical political economy within American academia, Wachtel continued the critique of the liberal Keynesian developmental state from a leftist perspective, arguing in his first IEO draft discussion paper that the welfare state had created “a political vacuum in which progressive programs are...non-existent.”13 The IEO plainly needed to transcend the liberal order.
Letelier’s networking initiatives also persisted. By early 1977, for example, TNI had gained official consultative status in the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and had established contacts within other targeted UN bodies, as well as with numerous other nongovernmental organizations.14 In addition, as the co-founder of the Union of Radical Political Economists, an academic association of radical leftist economists, Wachtel also brought his own vast network to the IEO programme. This included his contacts at the influential Institute for Development Studies’ (IDS) Dependency Working Group at the University of Sussex,15 as well as ties to renowned dependency theorists such as the Brazilian economist Celso Furtado.16
The IEO team spent the late 1970s building up a repertoire of pamphlets, and eventually books, and promoting them to governmental, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental institutions. The first of these included Michael Moffitt and Orlando Letelier’s pamphlet The International Economic Order and Howard Wachtel’s The New Gnomes, which were both published in June, 1977. The former was the IEO’s first splash into print, sold as a warning to US President Jimmy Carter’s administration that more cartels would form if it continued the trajectory set by its predecessor. The latter was a groundbreaking study on the private lending spree by multinational banks in the developing world, accelerated by the Carter administration and which facilitated austerity and authoritarianism in the Global South.17
Following the success of these works, the IEO team planned ‘a series of international meetings of parliamentarians, church leaders, union leaders and academics from the US, Canada, and Europe’ to spread their ideas.18