Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-08-07
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The persistence of authoritarian institutional legacies in democratic transitions remains one of the most consequential and underexamined problems in comparative political economy. Across Latin America, the formal restoration of electoral democracy has too often coexisted with the survival of economic frameworks designed to suppress organized labor, concentrate wealth, and insulate market structures from democratic contestation. Chile presents one of the most studied — yet still deeply instructive — cases of this phenomenon. As the world marks more than fifty years since the September 1973 military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, a renewed scholarly effort to assess the long-term structural consequences of that authoritarian interval is both timely and necessary. The Chilean trade union movement, once among the most vibrant and politically consequential in the Southern Cone, offers a particularly revealing lens through which to examine how dictatorship-era institutional engineering can outlast the regime that produced it, shaping the possibilities and constraints of organized labor well into the democratic era.
The article under review, published in Latin American Perspectives, directs analytical attention to the Plan Laboral de 1979 — the labor code rewritten under the Pinochet regime — as a foundational institutional intervention that restructured the terrain of industrial relations in Chile in ways that proved remarkably durable. The Plan Laboral, drafted largely under the intellectual influence of Chicago School economists and implemented by Labor Minister José Piñera, systematically fragmented union organizing by restricting collective bargaining to the firm level, prohibiting industry-wide or sectoral negotiations, and enabling employers to replace striking workers. These were not incidental provisions but purposive architectural choices designed to atomize labor's collective power, prevent class-based solidarity, and embed market logic into the very procedures by which workers could contest the terms of their employment. The dictatorship understood, with clarity that subsequent democratic governments were reluctant to act upon, that labor legislation is not merely regulatory infrastructure — it is a constitutive political technology that shapes the relative capacities of capital and labor to organize and bargain. By redesigning that technology in capital's favor, the Pinochet regime created path dependencies that democratic Chile would spend decades navigating around rather than dismantling.
What makes this analysis particularly significant is its temporal scope. At more than fifty years since the coup, the question is no longer simply whether authoritarian labor institutions survived the democratic transition — they did, with only partial and contested reforms — but how successive generations of Chilean workers and union organizers have adapted to, contested, and partially circumvented a legislative framework that was never designed for them. The article's engagement with the concept of revitalization is crucial here. Labor revitalization movements have been a subject of growing scholarly interest globally, as unions in the post-neoliberal era have sought to recover organizational density and political relevance through a combination of new recruitment strategies, coalition-building with social movements, and renewed ideological articulation. In the Chilean case, this process has occurred within an extraordinarily restrictive institutional environment, which means that whatever revitalization has occurred represents a genuine achievement against structural headwinds rather than a simple product of favorable conditions. The movements that emerged around the Estallido Social of October 2019, which eventually produced the constitutional convention process, demonstrated that popular mobilization in Chile retained enormous capacity even when formal union density and sectoral bargaining remained constrained — a finding with important implications for how scholars conceptualize the relationship between institutional labor power and broader social mobilization.
From a policy and development standpoint, the Chilean labor case carries lessons that extend well beyond the country's borders and speak directly to ongoing debates within international development assistance and civil society support frameworks. Donor governments and multilateral institutions have long wrestled with how to support labor rights and civil society in contexts where formal democratic institutions coexist with deep structural constraints on organized collective action. The Chilean experience suggests that post-transition legal reform of authoritarian-era labor codes is not merely a technical or procedural matter but a foundational political challenge, because those codes were themselves designed to be politically entrenched. Civil society organizations — including but not limited to trade unions — that operate within such inherited institutional environments often require external support that goes beyond capacity-building and extends to advocacy for legal and constitutional reform. ODA actors and international civil society support networks have sometimes underestimated this structural dimension, focusing on organizational strengthening while leaving the institutional framework itself unaddressed. The Chilean case argues for a more structurally informed approach to labor-linked civil society support in post-authoritarian contexts.
Looking forward, the significance of this scholarship is amplified by broader hemispheric and global trends. The turn toward left-of-center governments across Latin America in the early 2020s — including the election of Gabriel Boric in Chile himself, a figure who emerged directly from student movement organizing — raised expectations that authoritarian labor inheritances might finally be subject to comprehensive reform. Yet the defeat of successive constitutional reform proposals in Chile's 2022 and 2023 referendums illustrated how durable the political coalitions defending those institutional arrangements have proven, even a half-century after the coup that created them. For researchers and practitioners in the fields of civil society development, comparative democratization, and ODA policy design, Chile's ongoing negotiation with its own authoritarian past offers a sobering but essential reminder: transitions end, but the institutional architectures they inherit do not automatically dissolve. Understanding how labor movements survive, adapt, and occasionally revitalize within those inherited structures is not peripheral scholarship — it is among the most important analytical work the social sciences can produce for a world still grappling with the long afterlives of authoritarian governance.