Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-08-03
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The fiftieth anniversary of Chile's September 1973 coup d'état has renewed scholarly and policy attention to one of the twentieth century's most consequential experiments in authoritarian neoliberalism. In a global context defined by the resurgence of right-wing populism, the erosion of labor protections across the Global South, and intensifying debates about the proper role of civil society in democratic governance, the Chilean case retains extraordinary analytical relevance. Chile was not merely a country that experienced military dictatorship; it became the laboratory in which Friedrich von Hayek's disciples — the so-called Chicago Boys — were given unencumbered authority to reconstruct an entire political economy from the ground up. The consequences for organized labor were neither incidental nor reversible in any simple sense. Understanding how Chilean trade unionism survived, adapted, and is now tentatively revitalizing under structural conditions designed to prevent exactly that outcome offers critical lessons for development practitioners, ODA architects working in fragile democracies, and scholars of civil society resilience alike.
The article under review, published in Latin American Perspectives, directs analytical attention to the specific institutional mechanisms through which the Pinochet regime dismantled and reengineered Chilean labor relations. The centerpiece of this analysis is the Plan Laboral de 1979, designed by Labor Minister José Piñera and implemented at a moment when the regime had consolidated sufficient political control to restructure the rules of the game rather than simply suppressing opposition. The Plan Laboral was, in this respect, a more sophisticated instrument than simple repression. It atomized collective bargaining by confining it to the enterprise level, prohibited solidarity strikes, strictly limited union membership rolls, and created a parallel system of competing union organizations designed to fragment working-class solidarity. By enshrining these arrangements in law rather than merely enforcing them through coercion, the regime created what institutionalists would recognize as path dependency — a set of rules whose reversal becomes progressively more difficult as actors adapt their strategies to existing constraints. The result was not simply a weakened labor movement but a structurally reconfigured one, operating on terrain deliberately engineered to minimize collective action capacity.
What makes this analysis particularly significant is its engagement with the question of persistence across regime change. Chile's return to electoral democracy beginning with the 1988 plebiscite and the 1990 transition did not produce a wholesale reversal of the Pinochet-era labor framework. The Concertación governments that followed, despite their nominal center-left orientation, operated under constitutional and institutional constraints that preserved much of the neoliberal architecture — including, critically, the labor market rules of the Plan Laboral. This pattern resonates with a broader literature on authoritarian legacies in which transitions to democracy do not necessarily reset institutional arrangements to their pre-authoritarian defaults. Instead, successor democratic governments inherit and often consolidate economic institutions that were created under dictatorship, either because of genuine ideological alignment, because of fear of military intervention, or because business elites and international financial institutions condition their cooperation on continuity. Chile's labor institutions exemplify this dynamic with unusual clarity, and the article's attention to the more than fifty-year arc of these legacies moves the analysis beyond transition-period studies to examine the truly long-run consequences of authoritarian institution-building.
The article's attention to an emerging revitalization signals an important development that connects to wider regional currents. Chile's 2019 social uprising — the estallido social — was remarkable not only for its scale but for the degree to which it was organized and sustained outside the traditional structures of party politics and, initially, formal trade unionism. Yet it catalyzed new forms of popular mobilization that have since fed back into union organizing, particularly among precarious and platform-economy workers who had been largely invisible to enterprise-level bargaining structures. The election of Gabriel Boric in 2021 and the subsequent, if ultimately unsuccessful, constitutional reform process reflect a broader Latin American moment in which the political settlements of the post-transition period are being contested from the left. Similar dynamics are visible in Colombia under Gustavo Petro, in Mexico's labor law reforms under AMLO and his successor, and in the ongoing struggles of Brazilian unions under Lula's third administration to recover ground lost during the Temer and Bolsonaro years. In each case, organized labor is attempting to recover institutional terrain within frameworks that were, in varying degrees, shaped by periods of authoritarian constraint. The Chilean case is in some respects the most extreme — because the institutional redesign was most thorough — but it is not categorically different from these regional counterparts, and comparative analysis enriches understanding of all of them.
For researchers in ODA and development policy, the Chilean trade union story carries implications that extend well beyond labor economics. International development frameworks increasingly recognize that democratic governance, civil society capacity, and inclusive economic institutions are not simply desirable accompaniments to development but structural prerequisites for sustainable and equitable outcomes. Yet ODA programming has historically treated labor rights as a second-order concern, subordinating worker organization to macroeconomic stability, investor confidence, and export-oriented growth — precisely the logic that the Pinochet-era Chicago Boys pursued with such destructive thoroughness. When development agencies partner with governments that are actively constraining union organizing, restricting collective bargaining, or using enterprise-level frameworks to prevent sectoral solidarity, they are, however unintentionally, reinforcing authoritarian institutional legacies. The Chilean case provides a fifty-year stress test of what such arrangements produce: a highly unequal society with robust aggregate growth metrics but profound deficits in wage share, social protection, and democratic participation — deficits that eventually accumulated into the explosive social crisis of 2019. This is not an advertisement for the success of that model; it is a warning about the long-run costs of institutional designs that systematically exclude organized labor from economic governance.
Looking forward, the article's framing around revitalization invites careful optimism tempered by structural realism. The conditions that produced Chilean trade union weakness — enterprise-level bargaining, legal constraints on solidarity action, constitutional protections for property rights that exceed those for labor rights — remain largely in place despite recent reform efforts. The failure of the 2022 constitutional plebiscite, which would have introduced a more robust rights framework, illustrates how durable authoritarian legacies can be even in a formally democratic setting with a left-leaning executive. For practitioners and researchers, this underscores the importance of attending not only to formal democratic transitions but to the slower, harder work of institutional reform within successor regimes. It also highlights the potential role of international civil society networks, transnational labor solidarity, and ILO standards as external levers that can support domestic reform coalitions when internal political conditions are unfavorable. The trajectory of Chilean trade unionism over the next decade will be a significant test case for whether the post-2019 mobilization energy can be translated into durable institutional change, or whether the structural inheritance of 1973 will continue to define the limits of labor's role in one of Latin America's most closely watched political economies.