Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-08-09
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The fiftieth anniversary of the September 1973 coup in Chile has prompted a significant wave of historical and sociological reflection across Latin American studies, but perhaps no dimension of that reckoning is more consequential for contemporary politics and labor rights than the fate of the Chilean trade union movement. What happened to organized labor under Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship was not simply a matter of repression in the conventional sense — the suspension of rights, the detention or exile of activists — but something more structurally durable: the deliberate reengineering of the juridical and economic terrain on which labor relations would be conducted for generations. The article under review in Latin American Perspectives takes up this precise question, tracing the long shadow cast by Pinochet's institutional transformations over Chilean trade unionism from 1973 to the present, and asking whether the contemporary revival of labor organizing represents a genuine break from that authoritarian legacy or merely its latest adaptation. This is not merely a question of Chilean historiography. At a moment when democratic backsliding, labor market deregulation, and the erosion of civil society organizations are observable trends across multiple world regions, the Chilean case offers a uniquely stark laboratory for understanding how authoritarian institutional engineering can outlast the authoritarians who designed it.
The analytical core of the article rests on an examination of the Plan Laboral of 1979, the comprehensive labor reform package introduced under Labor Minister José Piñera during the height of the Pinochet regime's market-oriented restructuring. The Plan Laboral represented a watershed not because it simply suppressed labor rights — earlier decrees had already done that with immediate brutality — but because it reconstituted those rights within a new legal architecture designed to render collective action structurally ineffective. The plan imposed strict enterprise-level bargaining, severely restricted sympathy strikes and solidarity actions, and fragmented union representation in ways that systematically disadvantaged workers while formally preserving the language of labor freedom. This is what scholars of authoritarian institutional design sometimes call the "liberal veneer" problem: a set of rules that appear procedurally neutral but encode substantive power asymmetries at the foundational level. The article's contribution is to show that these asymmetries did not simply dissolve with the return of electoral democracy in 1990. Rather, because the Concertación governments that followed the dictatorship accepted so much of the constitutional and economic framework bequeathed by Pinochet — the 1980 Constitution, the model of the subsidiary state, the labor code — they also inherited and, in critical respects, reproduced the fragmentation of organized labor. The result was a paradox that the article traces with care: formal democratization accompanied by the persistence of structural conditions hostile to robust trade unionism.
This paradox resonates far beyond Chile's borders and connects to broader debates in the political economy of development and civil society studies. The Chilean case is often cited by development practitioners and ODA scholars as a cautionary tale about transitions that prioritize macroeconomic stability and investor confidence over the reconstitution of civic and labor institutions. What Chile illustrates is the potential for an "authoritarian institutional lock-in" in which donor-supported democratic transitions, by focusing narrowly on electoral mechanisms and constitutional formalities, inadvertently preserve the structural conditions that weaken independent civil society. The International Labour Organization's repeated engagements with Chilean labor law reform throughout the 1990s and 2000s, for instance, reflect precisely this tension: external advocacy for workers' rights running up against a domestic legal architecture that had been deliberately designed to resist collective bargaining at scale. Development scholars working on civil society strengthening programs in post-authoritarian contexts would do well to internalize the Chilean lesson, which suggests that the formal restoration of freedoms of association and assembly is necessary but far from sufficient if the economic and legal framework continues to fragment the organizations that exercise those freedoms.
The research significance of this article extends also to the question of what the authors call the "emerging revitalization" of Chilean trade unionism. The estallido social of October 2019 — the mass popular uprising triggered by a Metro fare increase in Santiago — brought into public view a striking contradiction: a society where formal labor organization had been systematically weakened over decades, yet where the capacity for collective action and popular mobilization had not been extinguished. The constitutional convention process that followed, however it ultimately concluded, demonstrated that Chileans retained the social and organizational resources to mount significant challenges to Pinochet-era institutional settlements. For labor researchers, this poses a theoretically interesting puzzle. If the Plan Laboral and its successors succeeded in fragmenting formal trade unionism, what organizational substrates sustained the capacity for collective action that erupted in 2019? The article gestures toward answers in the informal networks, community organizations, and federations that persisted at the margins of the formal labor code. These findings should prompt labor scholars and civil society researchers to revisit their frameworks for measuring organizational capacity, which have too often focused on registered union membership and formal bargaining agreements as proxies for the underlying social infrastructure of working-class collectivity.
For policymakers and practitioners engaged with labor rights and civil society development in post-authoritarian contexts, the Chilean case as analyzed in this article carries several forward-looking implications. First, it reinforces the argument that sustainable democratization requires not only the removal of authoritarian actors but the active dismantling of the institutional arrangements those actors put in place — a far more politically demanding task that many transitional governments, particularly those reliant on elite consensus-building, have been unwilling to undertake. Second, it suggests that ODA programming and civil society support frameworks need to operate over longer time horizons than is typical in donor-funded democracy assistance, since the reconstitution of robust labor and civic institutions after decades of authoritarian fragmentation is measured in generations, not project cycles. Third, and perhaps most significantly for the coming years, the article's attention to the tensions between authoritarian legacies and revitalization impulses offers a framework for understanding why labor movements across Latin America — in Chile, but also in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia — are experiencing renewed organizational energy even as formal union density remains comparatively low. The capacity for collective action may survive institutional suppression in forms that conventional measurement does not capture, and the practical and scholarly work of understanding those forms is among the most urgent tasks facing researchers in this field. Fifty years after the coup that made Chile the first laboratory for neoliberal restructuring, its trade union movement continues to teach lessons about the durability of authoritarian legacies and the resilience of working-class organization that scholars and practitioners across the world cannot afford to ignore.