Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-08-10
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The question of how authoritarian regimes leave lasting marks on civil society institutions has never been more relevant than in the present moment, as illiberal governments consolidate power across multiple continents and scholars grapple with the mechanisms through which institutional damage outlasts the regimes that inflict it. Chile occupies a particular position in this literature: it was both one of the earliest and most thoroughgoing laboratories for neoliberal restructuring imposed under military coercion, and one of the most widely studied cases of democratic transition. Yet as this article in Latin American Perspectives underscores, the full weight of what Pinochet's dictatorship did to Chilean organized labor cannot be measured merely by counting the dead and disappeared among union activists — though those losses were catastrophic and irreversible. The deeper wound was institutional, encoded in law and economic structure in ways designed to survive the dictator himself and constrain whatever democratic governments followed. More than five decades after the September 1973 coup, Chilean trade unionism remains partially in the shadow of decisions made in the late 1970s by a junta that understood, with considerable sophistication, that destroying the legal architecture of collective action was more durable than destroying the individuals who carried it.
The centerpiece of this institutional transformation was the Plan Laboral de 1979, the labor reform package designed by José Piñera and implemented under the broader neoliberal program championed by the economists trained at the University of Chicago. The Plan was not simply a set of restrictions on union activity in the traditional sense of martial prohibition; it was a restructuring of the legal field within which labor could organize at all. By atomizing collective bargaining to the level of the individual enterprise and banning solidarity strikes, the Plan severed the horizontal bonds between workers in different firms and sectors that give labor movements their systemic leverage. A union that can only negotiate with its own employer, and cannot legally coordinate action with unions elsewhere in the same industry, is a fundamentally different kind of political actor than one embedded in national or sectoral federations capable of exerting macroeconomic pressure. The Chilean reform deliberately chose the former configuration, and the article's core analytical contribution is to trace how the structures laid down under dictatorship persisted through the democratic era, shaping not only what unions could do but how workers came to understand what unions were for. This is a crucial distinction: legal constraints, over time, also become cognitive constraints, as generations of workers enter the labor force having known only the circumscribed model.
The implications extend well beyond Chilean industrial relations and speak to one of the central debates in comparative political economy about the relationship between democratic governance and inherited economic institutions. The Concertación governments that administered Chile from 1990 through 2010 consciously chose a strategy of economic continuity, preserving the broad architecture of the Pinochet-era model in exchange for political stability and the cooperation of conservative elites. This calculation — often described through the lens of "protected democracy" or elite pacted transition — meant that labor law reform was consistently subordinated to macroeconomic credibility and investor confidence. International development institutions, including the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, reinforced this disposition by treating the Chilean economic model as a regional success story worthy of emulation, effectively lending external legitimacy to institutional arrangements that organized labor found deeply hostile. The result was a peculiar form of path dependency in which democratic governments repeatedly deferred to institutional legacies they had not chosen and could not easily undo, while civil society organizations — including unions — were expected to function as partners in a governance model that had been architecturally designed to limit their power. For scholars of ODA and development policy, this Chilean trajectory raises enduring questions about whether internationally endorsed economic reform programs adequately account for the civic and institutional preconditions of sustainable democratic governance.
The article's focus on revitalization is particularly significant given the dramatic political upheaval Chile experienced beginning in October 2019, when a protest movement of remarkable breadth and intensity challenged the foundational premises of the neoliberal consensus. The estallido social, as it came to be known, was not a labor movement in any classical sense, but it drew on accumulated grievances — inequality, precarity, the erosion of public services — that had structural roots in exactly the economic model the Plan Laboral had helped entrench. Union organizations were among the actors who mobilized within the protest conjuncture, and the subsequent constitutional process opened space for revisiting labor law in ways that had been foreclosed for decades. The election of Gabriel Boric in 2021 — himself a figure of the student movement generation that had been shaped partly by disillusionment with the inherited democratic model — brought explicit commitments to labor reform to the executive level. Yet the constitutional process ultimately failed at the referendum stage, twice, revealing the profound difficulty of translating mobilized discontent into durable institutional transformation in a society where conservative elites retain substantial vetoing capacity. This tension between mobilization and institutionalization is precisely the terrain that scholars of Latin American civil society have been tracking for decades, and Chile's recent experience adds a particularly layered data point.
Looking forward, the Chilean case carries lessons that practitioners and researchers working on democratic resilience, civil society development, and post-authoritarian transitions in other regions would do well to absorb. The first and perhaps most sobering lesson is that institutional damage to labor and civil society organizations compounds over time rather than simply persisting: each decade in which atomized enterprise-level bargaining is the norm produces a new cohort of workers who have never experienced sectoral solidarity, a new generation of labor leaders whose strategic horizons have been narrowed by legal architecture, and a new set of employers whose practices and expectations are calibrated to a world of fragmented counterparts. Revitalization, when it comes, therefore cannot simply restore what was lost; it must construct something new under conditions shaped by the loss itself. The second lesson concerns the international development community's responsibility in how it frames and incentivizes institutional models in countries undergoing democratic transition or consolidation. When multilateral institutions treat labor flexibility and enterprise-level bargaining as development best practices without attending to their implications for civil society capacity and democratic accountability, they risk lending technical authority to arrangements that undermine the very governance quality those same institutions claim to support. A more integrated approach — one that treats strong, legally protected trade unionism as a component of democratic infrastructure rather than a potential impediment to growth — would require a significant shift in how ODA frameworks conceptualize the relationship between economic and political development. The Chilean experience, now more than fifty years in, provides the most detailed and painful evidence available for why that shift is long overdue.