Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-07-21
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The persistence of authoritarian institutional legacies within formally democratic systems is one of the most consequential and underexamined challenges in comparative political economy. Fifty years after the September 1973 military coup that ended Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government, Chile remains a critical laboratory for understanding how dictatorships engineer durable socioeconomic transformations that outlast their own political lifetimes. The Pinochet regime's most enduring achievement was not simply the physical suppression of the left — brutal and systematic as that suppression was — but rather the restructuring of the rules of economic and social life in ways that constrained future democratic governments and reshaped the capacities of civil society organizations, particularly organized labor. The article published in Latin American Perspectives arrives at a moment when these questions have returned to the foreground of both Chilean politics and international scholarship, and its analysis of the trade union movement's trajectory offers a compelling lens through which to examine the long shadow of authoritarian governance.
The scholarly contribution of this work centers on the role of the Plan Laboral of 1979 as the institutional mechanism through which the dictatorship reconstituted labor relations in Chile. Designed under the influence of neoliberal economic doctrine and implemented by José Piñera, this labor code fundamentally dismantled the architecture of collective action that had underpinned Chilean unionism during the preceding decades. The legislation restricted collective bargaining to the firm level, prohibited industry-wide negotiations, permitted the formation of parallel unions within a single enterprise, and severely curtailed the right to strike. These provisions were not incidental features of the plan but rather its central purpose: to atomize the labor movement, break the structural link between unions and political parties, and integrate Chilean workers into a market logic in which individual contracts rather than collective agreements defined their economic position. The effect was a dramatic collapse in union density and bargaining power that persisted even after the democratic transition of 1990. Unlike many authoritarian systems that leave informal power intact even as formal institutions change, the Pinochet regime inscribed its preferences in legal code, creating an institutional path dependency that successive democratic governments found difficult and politically costly to reverse. The article's attention to this dynamic — the translation of authoritarian power into legal architecture — is a significant analytical contribution that goes beyond simply cataloguing repression.
Understanding the Chilean case requires situating it within the broader regional and global context of labor movement trajectories in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Across Latin America, organized labor experienced severe disruption under military governments in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay during roughly the same period, and in each case the democratic restorations of the 1980s produced different outcomes for union power. Brazil's labor movement, operating under somewhat different institutional arrangements, played a central role in the transition process itself and subsequently gave rise to the Workers' Party, demonstrating that authoritarian suppression did not permanently incapacitate organized labor where the institutional architecture was not as thoroughly redesigned. Argentina saw renewed labor conflict alongside persistent fragmentation. Chile's particular trajectory — where the institutional redesign was most doctrinally consistent and most thoroughly implemented — produced a case in which the formal restoration of democracy did not translate into a restoration of labor's structural position within the political economy. This contrast matters not only for comparative politics but also for development practitioners and ODA stakeholders, since labor market governance, union strength, and wage-setting institutions are increasingly recognized as determinants of inclusive growth, inequality reduction, and the sustainability of social compacts.
The article's attention to signs of revitalization in the Chilean labor movement reflects genuinely important developments in the country's recent history. The estallido social of October 2019, the subsequent constitutional process, and the election of Gabriel Boric — himself a figure who emerged from student movement politics — opened a window for potential reform of the inherited labor framework. Union federation activity, new forms of labor organizing in sectors previously resistant to unionization including retail and logistics, and renewed debate over collective bargaining rights at the sectoral level all suggest that the atomizing effects of the Plan Laboral, while durable, are not permanent. For researchers working in the traditions of civil society studies and institutional theory, this moment raises important questions about the conditions under which inherited institutional arrangements become politically vulnerable to revision, and what role mobilization from below, electoral change, and international normative pressure each play in that process. The Chilean case also intersects with global debates about platform labor, the decline of traditional manufacturing-based unionism, and the need to construct new forms of collective voice appropriate to twenty-first century economies — challenges that are not unique to countries with authoritarian pasts but that are posed in particularly stark form where the formal institutional framework itself was designed to impede collective organization.
For policy practitioners and researchers engaged with ODA, civil society development, and democratic governance, the Chilean labor movement's trajectory over five decades carries several important implications. First, it underscores that democratic transitions are incomplete without attention to the institutional substrates of civil society; donor frameworks and governance-support programs that focus primarily on electoral procedures while neglecting labor law, associational freedoms, and the regulatory architecture of civil society risk supporting what might be termed "democracy without deliberation." Second, the apparent revitalization of Chilean unionism in recent years — contingent and fragile as it remains — suggests that even deeply entrenched authoritarian institutional legacies can become contested when political and social conditions shift sufficiently. This is an argument for sustained engagement with labor institutions as development partners rather than relegating them to the margins of governance programming. Third, the Chilean case offers methodological guidance: tracing authoritarian legacies through specific legislative mechanisms rather than through diffuse cultural or attitudinal measures allows for more precise analysis of where institutional interventions might be feasible and what their likely effects would be. As scholars and practitioners look ahead to a global landscape in which democratic backsliding and institutional erosion are accelerating concerns, Chile's experience of living with the structural inheritance of authoritarianism for half a century is not a remote historical curiosity but a forward-looking warning and, in the signs of renewal the article identifies, a cautious source of analytical hope.