Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-09-09
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
More than five decades after General Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup shattered Chile's democratic order, the question of how authoritarian institutional legacies continue to shape civil society remains strikingly relevant to scholars and practitioners of development and political economy alike. Chile is frequently held up as a model of market-oriented reform and democratic transition in Latin America, yet beneath this narrative lies a labor relations architecture largely unchanged since the dictatorship. This forthcoming article in Latin American Perspectives, "Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d'État," addresses a question with implications far beyond Chile's borders: what happens to organized labor and civil society when the legal and institutional scaffolding of authoritarianism outlives the regime that built it, and under what conditions can popular movements eventually contest that scaffolding? At a moment when democratic backsliding, the erosion of labor rights, and the shrinking of civic space are recurring themes across the Global South, understanding Chile's trajectory offers a valuable comparative lens for researchers tracking the durability—and eventual fragility—of authoritarian institutional design.
The article's central analytical thread runs through the Plan Laboral of 1979, the labor code engineered by the Pinochet dictatorship's technocratic architects to permanently weaken collective bargaining power and atomize the union movement. Unlike many authoritarian labor interventions that were reversed with the return of democracy, Chile's 1979 framework survived largely intact through the post-1990 transition, embedding restrictions on strike rights, sectoral bargaining, and union density into the supposedly democratic order that followed. This is the crux of the "authoritarian legacies" framing: formal democratization did not automatically translate into the restoration of associational power for workers. The article situates this within Chile's broader neoliberal experiment, in which the state's retreat from economic coordination was mirrored by a deliberate juridical retreat from supporting independent labor organization—effects that persisted through decades of center-left and center-right governments alike, illustrating how constitutional and legal path dependency can outlast the political coalitions that created it.
This dynamic resonates strongly with patterns observed elsewhere in Latin America and beyond, where authoritarian-era institutional settlements—whether in labor law, land tenure, or the regulation of nongovernmental organizations—have proven remarkably resistant to post-transition reform. Scholars of civil society and ODA-recipient states have long noted that formal democratic consolidation frequently coexists with what some call "enclaves of authoritarianism": pockets of institutional design that constrain popular mobilization even as electoral competition resumes. Chile's case is particularly instructive because it combines this pattern with one of the region's most celebrated macroeconomic success stories, complicating simplistic narratives that equate market liberalization with expanding civic and associational freedom. The article's attention to the "emerging revitalization" of Chilean unionism—likely tied to the cycle of mass mobilization beginning with the 2011 student movements and culminating in the 2019 estallido social and the subsequent constitutional process—positions Chilean labor's recent resurgence as part of a broader regional wave in which social movements have sought to renegotiate the terms of the neoliberal settlement through both street mobilization and institutional channels, echoing similar dynamics in Colombia's 2021 protests and Peru's recurrent social unrest.
For policy communities engaged in labor rights promotion, democratic governance programming, and civil society strengthening, this analysis carries direct implications. Development agencies and ODA providers have historically directed considerable resources toward formal democratic institution-building—elections, judicial independence, anti-corruption frameworks—while devoting comparatively less sustained attention to the granular legal architecture governing labor and associational rights, which often proves more consequential for the substantive quality of civic life. Chile's experience suggests that programs aimed at strengthening civil society in post-authoritarian or transitional contexts need to look beyond the presence of formal democratic procedures and interrogate whether the underlying legal infrastructure enables or forecloses collective action by workers and other organized constituencies. This has particular salience for donor engagement in contexts undergoing nominal democratization—from parts of Southeast Asia to sub-Saharan Africa—where authoritarian-era labor and NGO regulations frequently persist well after multiparty elections are introduced, quietly constraining the associational ecosystems that development assistance ostensibly seeks to cultivate.
Looking forward, the Chilean case offers researchers and practitioners a cautionary but ultimately hopeful template. It cautions against conflating procedural democratization with the substantive restoration of collective power, reminding analysts that institutional legacies of authoritarian rule can prove more durable than the political systems that once mattered most in shaping distributional outcomes. Yet it also demonstrates that such legacies are not immutable: the eventual mobilization capacity revealed since 2011, however uneven and ultimately constrained by the 2022 rejection of the proposed new constitution, shows that accumulated grievances can translate into renewed associational vitality even after decades of institutional suppression. For scholars of civil society and political economy, Chile at fifty years post-coup thus functions as a longitudinal case study in the temporality of authoritarian legacies—how long they persist, what conditions erode them, and what forms of revitalization become possible once cracks appear. Practitioners engaged in labor rights advocacy, ODA programming, and comparative civil society research would do well to treat the Chilean trajectory not as a closed historical episode but as an ongoing experiment in whether democratic transitions can eventually deliver the associational freedoms they formally promise.