Within minutes of Chilean lawmakers approving a bill that allows citizens to draw down 10% of their pensions to help make ends meet during the coronavirus pandemic, a phrase started trending on Twitter: “We’re going for more.” The bill’s authors insisted the raid on the private retirement system introduced in the 1980s under the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship was just an emergency measure but as it snowballed in popularity, so have the ambitions of those backing it.

Lawmakers who voted in favor of the bill last Thursday included 53% of center-right President Sebastian Pinera`s ruling coalition, dramatizing the tectonic shifts underway in a country that has long been a bullwark of free market capitalism with aspects of its economy copied by neighbors from Peru to Brazil. While the potential withdrawal from the accounts was set at 10%, economists and analysts said the bill had awakened many to the idea that the funds really belong to their contributors.

That could open the door for further raids on the accounts – until now jealously stewarded by their managers with strict rules for access – in times of crisis, they said. The privatized pension system was held up as the crowning glory of the economic shock treatment stewarded by a group of policy advisors called the Chicago Boys for their time studying at the University of Chicago under U.S.-based free marketeer Milton Friedman.

As the region now quakes under severe unemployment and reduced incomes under quarantine, the anti-free market gospel is proving just as contagious. Peru passed a law in April allowing citizens to withdraw up to 25% of their pensions early, and there are moves in Mexico and Brazil to allow similar drawdowns, even as some experts warn of the long-term consequences for cash-strapped governments.

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