Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-08-02
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The question of how authoritarian rule reshapes civil society institutions over the long term is 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 remarkable durability of institutional arrangements forged under conditions of extreme repression. The article published in Latin American Perspectives, examining the Chilean trade union movement at more than half a century's remove from that watershed moment, arrives at a critical juncture. Across Latin America and beyond, democratic backsliding, erosion of labor protections, and the suppression of collective bargaining rights have reasserted themselves as urgent concerns. Understanding how one of the most thoroughly neoliberalized societies in the global South arrived at its present configuration — and how workers have nonetheless managed to contest that legacy — offers indispensable lessons for researchers, development practitioners, and civil society advocates navigating analogous conditions elsewhere.
The Pinochet dictatorship did not merely repress the left and imprison union leaders. It undertook a systematic, architecturally deliberate reconstruction of Chile's labor relations landscape through the Plan Laboral of 1979, the centerpiece of the institutional transformation analyzed in this article. Designed by the so-called Chicago Boys under the intellectual influence of Milton Friedman's monetarist school, the Plan Laboral dismantled the corporatist framework that had organized Chilean industrial relations since the early twentieth century. It fragmented collective bargaining to the level of individual enterprises, stripped inter-enterprise and sectoral unions of most meaningful functions, restricted the right to strike, and legally empowered employers to replace striking workers. The effect was not merely technical. By atomizing labor at the firm level and embedding market logic as the sole legitimate mediating principle, the 1979 reforms restructured the very terrain on which class conflict could take place. Unions could exist, but only within limits designed to render them largely incapable of the kind of solidarity-based action that had historically made Chilean organized labor one of the most powerful in Latin America. The article's contribution lies precisely in tracing how these institutional constraints have persisted — and been contested — across the democratic transition and beyond.
What makes the Chilean case theoretically significant for students of political economy and institutional change is the phenomenon scholars call "path dependence": the tendency of institutional arrangements, once embedded, to reproduce themselves through formal rules, organizational incentives, and the cognitive frameworks of actors who learn to navigate within them. The democratic governments that have governed Chile since 1990 — including the center-left Concertación coalitions — operated under a constitutional framework itself designed by the dictatorship and only partially reformed. Labor law reform remained politically contentious and largely incremental for decades. This meant that the post-authoritarian trade union movement inherited not only the formal legal constraints of the Plan Laboral but also a fragmented organizational landscape, depleted membership rolls, and a cultural residue of fear and demobilization that decades of repression had instilled. The article's analytical frame, situating Chilean unionism as caught between authoritarian legacies on one side and an emerging revitalization on the other, captures this dialectic with precision. Recovery has been neither linear nor guaranteed; it has unfolded against stubborn structural headwinds.
The broader regional context amplifies the significance of these findings. Across Latin America, the late 2010s and early 2020s witnessed a renewed wave of social mobilization — from Chile's own estallido social of October 2019 to mass protests in Colombia, Ecuador, and beyond — that signaled deep dissatisfaction with inequality and institutional deficits accumulated over decades of market-oriented reform. The Chilean uprising, which was triggered by a transit fare increase but quickly expanded into demands for a new constitution and fundamental redistribution, demonstrated that the legacy structures of Pinochetismo remained deeply contested by organized constituencies including labor. The article under review situates trade union revitalization within this broader cycle of contention, asking what organizational and political conditions enable labor movements constrained by authoritarian-era institutions to reconstitute themselves as effective civil society actors. From an ODA and development policy perspective, this question has direct relevance: bilateral and multilateral development cooperation that aims to strengthen democratic governance and labor standards must reckon with the institutional inheritance that shapes what is possible in any given national context. Technical assistance that ignores path-dependent constraints risks prescribing organizational models that cannot take root in the soil available.
For policy implications, the article raises several considerations that extend well beyond Chile. First, labor law reform is not merely a technical matter of aligning statutes with international standards; it requires dismantling or significantly modifying the accumulated institutional architecture of authoritarian labor control, a process that encounters organized resistance from capital interests that have benefited from atomized bargaining. The slow pace of Chilean labor reform even under left-leaning administrations illustrates the difficulty of this undertaking. Second, the revitalization of trade unionism — where it has occurred — appears to have been driven less by formal legal change than by grass-roots organizing in new economic sectors, particularly retail, services, and logistics, which the traditional union movement neglected. This suggests that civil society capacity building must attend to organizational innovation and sector-specific mobilization, not merely the reform of enabling legal frameworks. Third, the intergenerational dimension matters: the Chilean workers who were politically formed in the estallido and its aftermath have no personal memory of pre-Pinochet labor culture, yet many have been drawn into union activity with markedly different expectations and repertoires than their predecessors. Development researchers and practitioners engaged in civil society support programming should take seriously how generational renewal shapes organizational culture in post-authoritarian settings.
Looking forward, the trajectory of Chilean trade unionism under President Gabriel Boric — himself a product of the student movement of the early 2010s and a figure whose political formation unfolded precisely in the space between authoritarian legacies and new forms of mobilization — will constitute a crucial test case. The failed 2022 constitutional referendum, which would have enshrined extensive labor rights alongside a range of other social guarantees, illustrated how contested the terrain of institutional transformation remains. Yet the durability of social mobilization, the growth of union density in previously unorganized sectors, and the emergence of new forms of inter-union solidarity suggest that the revitalization the article identifies is not merely cyclical. For scholars of comparative labor politics and civil society, Chile at fifty years past the coup offers a sobering but ultimately instructive account of institutional resilience — both the resilience of authoritarian frameworks designed to contain popular power, and the resilience of the organized workers who have refused to accept those frameworks as permanent. For development practitioners and ODA actors committed to democratic governance and workers' rights, the lesson is that supporting labor as a pillar of civil society requires long-term, structurally informed engagement with the specific historical sediment of each national context, rather than generic prescriptions borrowed from experiences elsewhere.