From the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he maintained ongoing contact with its teams, first from Uruguay through his affiliation with the University of Montevideo and later as President of the Governing Council of the Latin American and Caribbean Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES). In 1972, he assumed the position of Executive Secretary of ECLAC, at a particularly complex period for the region.

In this ECLAC Oral History interview, Iglesias recalls that formally joining the Commission was “a privilege and a great personal honour”. For him, ECLAC had been, since his youth, “a magnet for attracting ideas”, a space that decisively influenced Latin American economic thinking and his own intellectual formation. “Entering ECLAC was like entering a monastery I had always wanted to belong to,” he notes.

His tenure was marked by significant political and institutional challenges. After the 1973 coup d’état in Chile, one of his main objectives was to preserve staff unity and maintain the Commission’s operations.. He therefore advanced the opening and strengthening of offices outside Santiago, notably in Buenos Aires and Mexico, and made a key decision: throughout his mandate, ECLAC’s international meetings were held outside Chile, to ensure the participation of all member States. “It was preferable to assume the cost than to exclude countries that were unwilling to come,” he explains.

At the same time, he firmly defended ECLAC’s continued presence in Santiago, despite international pressure to relocate its headquarters. For Iglesias, leaving Chile would have meant an unjust moral sanction against a country that had historically been committed to the institution.

Looking back, Iglesias underscores that ECLAC “ignited the spark of regional cooperation” and established itself as a space for dialogue, solidarity and critical thinking. “I felt very proud to be part of ECLAC, and I still am,” he concludes.