Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-07-11
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The relationship between authoritarian governance and the long-term structural transformation of labor institutions represents one of the most consequential yet underexamined dynamics in the comparative study of political economy. As scholars and practitioners grapple with democratic backsliding across multiple regions — from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe and parts of Latin America — the question of how authoritarian regimes reshape the foundational institutions of civil society, particularly organized labor, carries renewed urgency. Chile offers perhaps the most analytically compelling case study in the global literature, not only because of the sheer comprehensiveness of the institutional redesign imposed following the 1973 coup d'état against Salvador Allende, but because the country has since been held up simultaneously as a model of neoliberal economic success and as a cautionary tale about the social costs of market-driven governance. The article under review in Latin American Perspectives intervenes in this debate at a symbolically significant moment — more than half a century after September 11, 1973 — asking how the politico-economic and institutional architecture constructed under Augusto Pinochet continues to shape Chilean trade unionism, even as new signs of revitalization begin to emerge.
At the heart of the analysis is the Plan Laboral of 1979, the labor code redesign engineered principally by José Piñera during the height of the Pinochet government's technocratic consolidation. The Plan Laboral was not merely a set of regulatory adjustments; it was a deliberate architectural intervention intended to atomize collective action by fragmenting bargaining units to the firm level, severely restricting inter-company union organizing, limiting the scope and duration of legal strikes, and introducing individual labor contracts as a parallel and often preferred mechanism to collective agreements. The cumulative effect was to render Chilean unions structurally weak precisely at the moment when the country was being integrated into global markets on terms favorable to foreign capital and domestic economic elites. By stripping unions of their capacity for sectoral or national-level bargaining, the regime effectively severed the institutional link between labor organization and macroeconomic policy that had characterized the Chilean left's political project under the Popular Unity government. What is analytically significant about this intervention — and what the article appears to explore in depth — is that these structural constraints did not evaporate with the return of democratic governance in 1990. Instead, they became path-dependent features of Chile's post-authoritarian political economy, embedded in legislation, juridical precedent, and employer expectations in ways that successive center-left governments proved either unable or insufficiently motivated to dismantle.
The persistence of these authoritarian legacies speaks to a broader pattern observable across Latin America's transitional democracies, where the formal restoration of electoral politics did not necessarily translate into the substantive recovery of civil society autonomy or labor power. In countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, labor movements navigated post-authoritarian transitions with varying degrees of institutional continuity, depending heavily on the pace and completeness of legal reform, the strength of union bureaucracies that survived repression, and the political alignments of governing coalitions. Chile's trajectory was distinctive because the Pinochet government remained in power long enough — and achieved sufficient macroeconomic stabilization — to convince significant portions of the political class and the emerging technocratic elite that the neoliberal model was irreversible. The Concertación governments of the 1990s and 2000s, despite their social democratic orientation, largely accepted this framing, pursuing what critics described as a strategy of economic continuity with social amelioration rather than structural transformation. The consequence for organized labor was a prolonged period of institutional adaptation to unfavorable conditions, characterized by declining union density, weak bargaining power, and an increasing reliance on political rather than industrial channels to advance workers' interests.
The article's attention to signs of emerging revitalization is therefore particularly significant from a policy and research standpoint. Chile's social uprising of October 2019 — the estallido social — demonstrated that the accumulated tensions of three decades of market liberalism without commensurate gains in social protection could produce mass mobilization of extraordinary scope and intensity. The subsequent constitutional convention, the election of Gabriel Boric in 2021 on an explicitly transformative platform, and the labor reforms pursued by his government have reopened institutional spaces that seemed foreclosed during the long neoliberal consensus. For scholars of civil society and ODA practitioners working in the region, these developments raise important questions about the conditions under which authoritarian institutional legacies can be effectively challenged, and what forms of international support — whether technical, financial, or normative — can most usefully accompany domestic reform processes without substituting for the organic political agency of labor movements themselves.
Looking forward, the Chilean case offers a rich field of inquiry for researchers interested in the intersection of labor politics, democratic deepening, and development outcomes. The persistence of Pinochet-era labor law well into the twenty-first century underscores that regime change and democratic transition, while necessary conditions, are rarely sufficient to undo the institutional sediment deposited by authoritarian governance. At the same time, the revitalization now underway — fragile, contested, and by no means guaranteed — suggests that path dependence is not destiny. For practitioners in the civil society and development space, the implication is that sustained engagement with labor organizing as a form of democratic capacity-building deserves far greater prominence in programming frameworks than it has historically received. The fiftieth anniversary of the Chilean coup provides not merely an occasion for historical reflection but an analytical vantage point from which to assess the long arc of institutional transformation, and to ask what kinds of solidarity, research, and policy innovation will be required if the revitalization of Chilean trade unionism is to prove durable rather than episodic.