De Soto organized the meeting with Hayek and Ayau in 1979, the year he moved back to Lima. He tells the story of how he initially tried to set himself up in business as the representative of a group of investors who had purchased the rights to gold placer deposits. The mining enterprise failed after the investors went to review their concessions in the rain forest and found hundreds of local people already panning for gold without concessions (Berlau 2003). De Soto had discovered the problem of informal property claims. His contacts in the European and North American neoliberal movement offered an answer to the problem.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1947