Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-08-06
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The fiftieth anniversary of the September 1973 coup in Chile offers more than a moment for historical remembrance. It presents an occasion to assess the enduring institutional consequences of authoritarian rule on organized labor — consequences that continue to shape the political economy of one of Latin America's most economically prominent nations. As debates over labor rights, inequality, and democratic governance intensify across the Global South, the Chilean case offers a uniquely instructive lens through which to examine how authoritarian legacies become embedded in institutional frameworks and persist long after formal democratization. The article under review, published in Latin American Perspectives, takes up precisely this challenge, tracing the arc of Chilean trade unionism from the shock of the coup through the structural transformations of the dictatorship to the complex and uneven processes of revitalization now underway. It arrives at a moment when the global scholarly community is increasingly attentive to what democratic transitions do and do not actually transform, and when civil society organizations — including labor unions — are reasserting themselves in ways that challenge both market orthodoxy and political complacency.
The Pinochet regime did not merely suppress trade unionism through repression, detention, exile, and murder, though it did all of those things with brutal efficiency. Its more durable intervention was legislative and institutional. The Plan Laboral of 1979, designed under the influence of the so-called Chicago Boys and associated with Labor Minister José Piñera, fundamentally reorganized the legal architecture governing labor relations in Chile. The plan atomized collective bargaining by restricting it to the firm level, prohibited sympathy strikes and solidarity actions, curtailed union membership incentives, and created parallel non-union bargaining entities that competed with established unions for worker representation. These reforms were not incidental to the neoliberal economic project; they were central to it. By dismantling the collective power of organized labor, the dictatorship created the conditions for the sustained wage suppression, export-led growth strategies, and investor-friendly regulatory environments that would define the Chilean economic model for decades. The article's core contribution lies in mapping how these legal constraints were not fully dismantled during the democratic transition that began in 1990, and how successive Concertación governments, while restoring certain civil liberties, largely preserved the neoliberal labor framework inherited from the dictatorship.
Understanding this inheritance requires situating Chile within the broader regional and global dynamics of labor movement decline. Across Latin America, structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s produced similarly hostile environments for organized labor, though the mechanisms differed. In Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, the erosion of union power came through a combination of economic crisis, privatization, and political accommodation, rather than through a single decisive legislative intervention as in Chile. Globally, the period from the late 1970s onward was marked by what scholars such as Beverly Silver and others have characterized as a long retreat of labor power relative to capital, driven by financialization, production fragmentation, and the global mobility of capital. What distinguishes Chile is the degree to which this shift was institutionally crystallized through deliberate legal engineering rather than emerging organically from market pressures. This gives the Chilean case particular analytical value: it offers a near-experimental instance of institutional design in the service of labor deactivation, making visible the mechanisms that elsewhere remained partially obscured. For researchers working on labor politics and ODA-adjacent questions of governance, the Chilean case illuminates how international financial institutions, donor frameworks, and technocratic elites have sometimes collaborated — whether explicitly or structurally — in embedding market-friendly labor regimes that outlast the immediate political conditions of their creation.
The article's attention to revitalization tendencies is equally significant from a policy standpoint. The massive social uprising of October 2019 — the estallido social — demonstrated that decades of institutional demobilization had not extinguished the capacity for collective action among Chilean workers and communities. That uprising, which drew directly on grievances about inequality, pension privatization, and the costs of the privatized social services regime installed under Pinochet, forced the issue of constitutional reform onto the national agenda and temporarily reinvigorated labor and social movement organizing. The subsequent constitutional process, though ultimately unsuccessful in producing a new constitutional text acceptable to a majority, nonetheless revealed the depth of popular demand for institutional redesign. For labor unions specifically, this period created new openings for political relevance, even as the organizational weaknesses produced by decades of fragmented bargaining remained. The policy implication is clear: legal reform of labor relations — including revisiting the firm-level bargaining restrictions of the Plan Laboral — is not merely a technical adjustment but a precondition for meaningful democratic consolidation. International development actors and civil society support organizations operating in Chile and analogous contexts would do well to recognize that sustainable democratic governance is incompatible with labor institutions designed specifically to prevent workers from exercising collective voice.
Looking forward, the Chilean case poses a set of questions that will preoccupy scholars and practitioners across the region for years to come. Can a democratic polity, constrained by constitutional frameworks and economic treaties that entrench market liberalism, actually reform the labor institutions it inherited from authoritarian rule? What role can international civil society networks, ODA-funded governance programming, and transnational labor solidarity play in supporting union revitalization without replicating the paternalistic dynamics that have often characterized external engagement with Southern social movements? And perhaps most fundamentally, what does the durability of the Plan Laboral's legacy tell us about the theory of democratic transition itself — about whether institutional transformation is even possible without deliberate, politically costly confrontation with the structural residues of authoritarianism? The article reviewed here does not claim to resolve these questions, but it sharpens them considerably. By holding together the weight of institutional history and the fragile energies of contemporary revitalization, it makes a case for a kind of scholarly attention that refuses easy optimism and equally refuses fatalism — an orientation that development researchers, policymakers, and civil society practitioners working on democratic consolidation in Latin America and beyond would do well to internalize.