Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-07-18
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The question of how authoritarian ruptures reshape the institutional fabric of civil society — and how long those effects endure — stands among the most consequential in comparative political economy. Fifty years after the September 1973 coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile, scholars and practitioners continue to grapple with the depth of structural transformation that military rule imposed on Latin America's once most-organized labor movement. The article published in Latin American Perspectives under the title "Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d'État" arrives at a moment when these questions carry renewed urgency — not only for Chile's own democratic consolidation but for a global landscape in which the resilience of organized labor under neoliberal and authoritarian pressures is everywhere being tested. Chile's trajectory offers one of the starkest and most analytically rich case studies available to researchers attempting to understand what autocracy truly does to the associational life of a society, and how — if at all — civil society recovers once formal democracy is restored.
The analytical centerpiece of the article is the 1979 Labor Plan, the legislative architecture through which the Pinochet regime attempted to permanently restructure the Chilean labor market. The Plan Laboral was not simply a set of emergency restrictions but a coherent ideological project, shaped heavily by Chicago School economists and designed to atomize collective bargaining, limit union scope to the firm level, and sever the organizational links that had allowed Chilean unions in the pre-coup era to act as genuine political actors across industries and regions. By constraining collective action to individual workplaces and stripping unions of their broader political legitimacy, the regime sought to transform labor from a social force into a mere transactional mechanism for wage negotiation. This was authoritarian governance as institutional engineering: the coup provided the violent opening, but the Labor Plan attempted to make the consequences permanent by embedding market discipline into the legal architecture of the state itself. The article's attention to this distinction — between the repressive and the institutional dimensions of the Pinochet project — is an important scholarly contribution. Many analyses of authoritarianism focus appropriately on political violence and exile; this work reminds us that the deeper damage is often done through the quieter mechanisms of legislative redesign.
The connection between the Labor Plan's legacy and the current condition of Chilean trade unionism is where the article makes its most substantive analytical contribution. Despite the return of formal democracy in 1990 and more than three decades of civilian government, Chilean labor law retained much of the Pinochet-era framework well into the twenty-first century. The post-transition governments of the Concertación coalition — themselves products of the political settlement that ended military rule — proved reluctant to fundamentally revise the inherited labor architecture, partly because the economic model it underpinned had produced growth indicators that provided political cover. The result was a persistent fragmentation of labor organization, low rates of union density relative to historical norms and to comparable economies, and a structural marginalization of unions from the broader policy process. Understanding this paradox — democratic governance operating within authoritarian institutional constraints — is essential to interpreting Chilean political economy, and it resonates far beyond Chile's borders. Scholars studying transitions from authoritarianism in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa have similarly found that formal democratization does not automatically reverse the civil society damage wrought by predecessor regimes, particularly when economic elites invested in the old model retain influence during transition negotiations.
Against this backdrop of institutional persistence, the article also takes seriously the signs of potential revitalization in Chilean trade unionism, and this forward-looking dimension gives the analysis its contemporary relevance. The social uprising of October 2019, which saw massive street mobilizations against inequality and the inherited neoliberal model, demonstrated that Chilean civil society retained deep reserves of collective energy even where formal organizational capacity had been weakened. The subsequent constitutional process — though ultimately inconclusive in its first iteration — opened political space for a renegotiation of the social compact. Labor organizations participated in these debates in ways that exceeded their formal institutional weight, suggesting that the relationship between formal union structures and broader social mobilization may be more complex than density statistics alone reveal. For researchers working on civil society capacity and social movements, this dynamic is theoretically significant: it raises questions about whether informalized networks of solidarity can sustain collective agency in contexts where formal associational structures have been deliberately degraded. The Chilean experience suggests that authoritarian institutional engineering can suppress but rarely extinguish the underlying social logics of collective action.
From the perspective of development policy and ODA research, these findings carry direct implications for how international actors design civil society support programs in transitional and post-authoritarian contexts. The Chilean case demonstrates that legal and institutional reform must accompany any effort to rebuild organized civil society — access to funding, capacity building, and technical assistance are necessary but insufficient if the underlying legislative framework continues to penalize collective action or restrict the scope of civil society actors. Donors and development agencies working in contexts where authoritarian legacies persist — and there are many such contexts today, from Central America to the Horn of Africa — should treat labor law reform and associational freedom as core governance priorities rather than secondary concerns subordinate to macroeconomic stabilization. The history of Chile's Labor Plan stands as a cautionary example of how deeply neoliberal and authoritarian projects can become mutually reinforcing, and how difficult it is to disentangle them once they have been codified into law and normalized across a generation of economic policy.
Looking ahead, the article's significance extends well beyond Chile and beyond the specific fiftieth-anniversary moment that prompted its writing. The global resurgence of authoritarian tendencies — documented across both the Global South and established democracies — makes the Chilean experience more relevant, not less, as a template for understanding what is at stake when civil society organizations lose political protection. The question of labor revitalization in Chile will ultimately be answered not just through the energy of street protests or the outcomes of electoral cycles, but through the patient, unglamorous work of legislative reform, union organizing, and the reconstruction of cross-sectoral solidarity networks. Researchers at institutions engaged with ODA, civil society, and global political economy have a particular responsibility to track these processes longitudinally, resisting the temptation to read moments of mobilization as permanent inflection points before their institutional effects are legible. Chile's trade union movement, navigating between the weight of authoritarian legacies and the possibilities opened by democratic renewal, remains one of the most instructive ongoing experiments in the contested politics of civil society recovery.