Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-08-11
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 coup d'état in Chile arrived not merely as a historical milestone but as a moment of urgent reckoning. Across Latin America and beyond, scholars, labor activists, and policymakers have returned with renewed intensity to the question of how authoritarian ruptures reshape the structural conditions of civil society for generations. Chile's case is particularly instructive because its military dictatorship did not simply suppress organized labor as a matter of political expediency — it deliberately and systematically restructured the legal, institutional, and economic architecture within which workers could collectively act. Understanding how trade unionism survived, adapted, and is now attempting to revitalize itself in that environment is not an antiquarian exercise. It speaks directly to contemporary debates about democratic backsliding, the erosion of labor rights under market fundamentalism, and the long institutional shadows that authoritarian periods cast over successor democracies. As authoritarian governance experiences a global resurgence and as the neoliberal restructuring of labor markets continues to fragment working-class solidarity in country after country, the Chilean experience provides one of the most methodologically rich and historically documented cases available to comparative political economists and civil society scholars alike.
The analytical core of this article rests on a structural argument: that the Pinochet dictatorship's most durable intervention was not the violence of 1973 itself but the institutional redesign that followed, culminating in the Plan Laboral of 1979. Crafted under the influence of the Chicago School economists who had come to dominate Chilean economic policy, the Plan Laboral was a comprehensive reconfiguration of labor law that atomized collective bargaining, restricted union jurisdiction to the enterprise level, introduced flexible dismissal mechanisms, and placed significant procedural obstacles in the path of strike action. Where previous Chilean labor law had permitted sectoral and national collective bargaining that gave unions genuine economic leverage, the 1979 framework deliberately confined union power to individual firms, ensuring that workers could not coordinate across industries or mount the kind of economy-wide challenges that had characterized the labor movement of the Allende period and before. The consequences were profound and persistent: union density collapsed, and even after the return of democratic governance in 1990, successive administrations found themselves politically constrained in dismantling a labor framework that had become structurally embedded in Chile's export-oriented development model. The article's insight, then, is that the dictatorship's legacy operates not primarily through overt repression in the democratic present but through the institutional grammar it inscribed into law, making revitalization extraordinarily difficult even under formally democratic conditions.
Situating this analysis within the broader regional and global context reveals how Chile's trajectory both parallels and diverges from comparable cases. Across Latin America, the wave of military dictatorships that swept the region in the 1970s — Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia — each imposed variants of labor market flexibilization that outlasted the regimes themselves, becoming constitutive features of the neoliberal transitions of the 1980s and 1990s. What distinguished Chile was the ideological coherence and radicalism of the labor reform: no other military government in the region implemented so thoroughgoing a redesign of collective labor relations in so compressed a timeframe. This created a particularly deep path dependency. When scholars discuss authoritarian legacies in comparative perspective, they often focus on institutional continuities in judicial systems, security forces, or constitutional design — the so-called "authoritarian enclaves" theorized by Manuel Antonio Garretón. The Chilean labor case extends this framework into the political economy of organized civil society, demonstrating that labor law is itself a site of authoritarian legacy-building with consequences as enduring as any formal constitutional provision. Globally, this resonates with debates in labor studies about the long-run effects of union avoidance legislation, right-to-work laws, and enterprise-level bargaining frameworks in advanced economies — debates that have taken on new urgency as trade union density has declined sharply across the OECD world in recent decades.
The policy implications of this scholarship are substantial, particularly for those engaged in ODA programming and civil society support in transitional and post-authoritarian contexts. Development institutions and international donors frequently invest in civil society strengthening — building organizational capacity, supporting advocacy coalitions, funding civic education. Yet this scholarship suggests that without parallel attention to the legal and institutional environment in which civil society organizations operate, capacity-building interventions may yield limited structural results. A trade union that has been legally confined to enterprise-level bargaining cannot build the kind of cross-sectoral solidarity that produces genuine political counterweight, regardless of how organizationally sophisticated its leadership becomes. For development practitioners, this points toward a more explicitly structural program of support — one that takes labor law reform, regulatory frameworks for collective action, and the political economy of enabling environments as seriously as it takes organizational capacity. The Inter-American Development Bank, the International Labour Organization, and bilateral donors with programming in countries navigating authoritarian legacy all have reason to engage with this research, as it reframes the unit of analysis from organizational capacity to institutional architecture.
Looking forward, the article's reference to an "emerging revitalization" of Chilean trade unionism points toward the most consequential question for researchers and practitioners in the coming decade. The social uprising of October 2019 in Chile — the estallido social — demonstrated that popular grievances rooted in precisely the structural inequalities Pinochet's economic model produced had not dissipated but had accumulated into a volatile mass. The subsequent constitutional convention process, though ultimately unsuccessful in ratifying a new constitution, represented an attempt by broad sectors of Chilean civil society, including organized labor, to renegotiate the foundational rules of political and economic life. The revitalization referenced in this article's title must therefore be understood in this conjunctural context: Chilean trade unionism is attempting to rebuild its political significance at a moment when the country's entire institutional framework is under contestation, and when the left-wing government of Gabriel Boric has made labor reform a stated priority. Whether that revitalization can achieve structural depth — whether it can undo or substantially modify the enterprise-level bargaining framework of the Plan Laboral — remains genuinely uncertain. For scholars of authoritarian legacy and democratic consolidation, Chile in this moment offers an almost uniquely rich natural experiment in whether democratic political will, combined with an activated civil society, can overcome institutional path dependencies built by a prior authoritarian regime. The answer will have implications well beyond Latin America, for any society grappling with the long institutional reach of its own illiberal past.