Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-07-27
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The fiftieth anniversary of the Chilean coup d'état of September 11, 1973 passed with considerable scholarly and public attention, yet the enduring institutional and structural consequences of the Pinochet dictatorship remain insufficiently theorized, particularly with respect to organized labor. Chile occupies a singular position in comparative political economy: it was the laboratory in which neoliberal restructuring was first applied at state scale, decades before the Washington Consensus exported similar frameworks across the developing world. The Chilean trade union movement, once among the most politically organized and militant in Latin America, absorbed the full weight of that experiment. Understanding what happened to Chilean labor is not merely an exercise in historical recovery — it is essential to grasping why civil society organizations across the Global South continue to struggle against institutional architectures designed not to suppress them temporarily, but to disable them permanently. The article under review, published in Latin American Perspectives, takes precisely this long view, tracing the trajectory of Chilean trade unionism across more than fifty years of authoritarian imposition and contested democratic recovery.
The analysis centers on the Plan Laboral de 1979, the labor legislation introduced by the Pinochet government's economy minister José Piñera, which constitutes one of the most consequential pieces of labor legislation in twentieth-century Latin American history. The Plan Laboral was not simply a suppression of union rights in the crude sense of prohibition. It was architecturally more sophisticated: it fragmented the collective bargaining unit to the enterprise level, prohibited solidarity strikes, restricted union membership rights, and introduced a system of individual contracting that structurally undermined the logic of collective action. The effect was to embed anti-collectivist incentives into the legal fabric of the labor market itself. Where previous authoritarian governments in Latin America had often dismantled unions through direct repression and then reconstituted corporatist labor arrangements to serve state interests, Pinochet's model did something categorically different — it dismantled the material foundations of collectivism and replaced them with market-individualist substitutes. The article's contribution is to show that this design proved durable well beyond the dictatorship itself, persisting through the democratic transition of 1990 and shaping the structural limits within which the labor movement has operated ever since.
This durability is the crux of the analytical problem the article engages. Chilean democracy after 1990 was a democracy of negotiated transition, and the terms of that negotiation — the 1989 constitutional reforms, the binomial electoral system, and critically the maintenance of the basic architecture of the Plan Laboral — constrained what Concertación governments could accomplish in the labor sphere. Union density in Chile remained among the lowest in the region throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and collective bargaining coverage tracked accordingly. Yet the article also documents what it describes as an emergent revitalization, a process that appears linked to several converging dynamics: the generational renewal of labor leadership, the rise of sector-specific organizing in retail and logistics, the political mobilization catalyzed by the estallido social of October 2019, and the election of Gabriel Boric — himself a student movement leader — to the presidency in 2022. These developments do not resolve the structural constraints imposed by the Plan Laboral, which remains largely intact despite reform efforts, but they suggest that the movement is developing forms of political leverage and social coalition-building that partially circumvent the legal chokepoints built into the system.
From the perspective of development studies and ODA scholarship, the Chilean case carries implications that extend well beyond its national boundaries. International donors and civil society support organizations have long operated on an assumption that democratic transition creates a permissive environment for labor rights and civil society expansion. The Chilean experience complicates this assumption fundamentally. Institutional design under authoritarianism can function as a persistent structural constraint that outlasts the regime that created it, shaping the distributional politics of successor democracies in ways that conventional transition frameworks fail to anticipate. Development practitioners working in post-authoritarian contexts — and there are many across Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia that face analogous dynamics — need analytic frameworks that assess not only whether a regime has changed, but whether the legal and institutional frameworks through which civil society operates have genuinely been democratized or remain encoded with the preferences of the prior authoritarian order. Chile suggests that the latter is entirely possible, and that international support for civil society that ignores the institutional substrate operates at best superficially and at worst reinforces existing power asymmetries.
Looking forward, the Chilean case poses important questions for both researchers and practitioners. The revitalization documented in the article is real but precarious, contingent on a political moment that may or may not persist. The defeat of Boric's constitutional reform proposal in the 2022 and 2023 referendums indicates the depth of resistance to structural change in Chilean society, and the labor reform agenda has moved more slowly than the government's earliest supporters hoped. The research challenge is to develop longitudinal frameworks capable of distinguishing between conjunctural labor mobilization — which tends to ebb with political cycles — and genuine institutional transformation that reshapes the rules of collective action in durable ways. For civil society scholars, the Chilean case is also a reminder that authoritarian legacies are not simply matters of political culture or collective memory; they are embedded in law, in contract structures, in enterprise-level bargaining rules, and in the everyday incentives that workers and employers face. Reversing them requires not just political will but meticulous institutional redesign, a task that is as technically demanding as it is politically contested. The article's appearance at this particular historical juncture — more than five decades after the coup, in the middle of a reform government navigating structural constraints it did not create — makes it a timely and necessary contribution to a literature that will only grow in importance as scholars continue to reckon with the long afterlife of authoritarian governance across the developing world.