De Soto's European background and connections were seldom mentioned by his neoliberal supporters. His credibility and growing authority as a popular development economist came to depend on his identity as a neoliberal from the Third World, willing to describe the poverty of the global South as a self-inflicted injury unconnected to its relationship to the North. "Instead of seeing the developing world as victims of capitalism, Hernando argues, 'We're inflicting our own wounds,'" reported Andrew Natsios, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. "Since he is Peruvian, he can make this argument credibly" (quoted in Kleiner 2004).

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1948