[LAP] Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d’État
Latin American Perspectives, Volume 53, Issue 4, Page 67-87, July 2026. This article analyzes how the politico-economic and institutional changes imposed by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) have affected Chilean trade unionism. It explores how the Plan Laboral de
Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-09-25
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
Chile's political economy has re-entered comparative debates on authoritarian legacies as the country approaches the sixth decade since the coup d'état of September 11, 1973, which overthrew the government of Salvador Allende and installed the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, in power from 1973 to 1990. This anniversary context frames an article forthcoming in Latin American Perspectives, Volume 53, Issue 4 (July 2026, pages 67-87), titled "Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d'État." The timing is significant for scholars of civil society and organized labor across Latin America, since Chile is frequently cited as the paradigmatic case of neoliberal restructuring imposed under authoritarian rule, and the persistence of institutions designed under dictatorship, more than three decades after the transition to democracy, raises pointed questions about how durable authoritarian legal architecture can be even after formal democratization.
The article's central analytical device is the Plan Laboral de 1979, the 1979 Labor Plan enacted by the Pinochet government, which the piece treats as the institutional hinge connecting the dictatorship era to the present weakness and fragmentation of Chilean unionism. According to the summary of the article, the Plan Laboral reshaped the politico-economic and institutional environment in which Chilean unions operate, and its effects are presented as long-lasting rather than transitional. This framing situates the article within a broader scholarly tradition that treats labor codes not as neutral technical instruments but as deliberate mechanisms of demobilization: by restructuring collective bargaining rights, union representation, and the legal scope of strikes at the plant rather than sectoral level, a labor code drafted under military rule can continue to constrain organized labor's bargaining power long after the regime that wrote it has left office. The article's dual emphasis on "authoritarian legacies" and "emerging revitalization" signals that it does not treat Chilean unionism as simply frozen since 1979, but instead documents a tension between institutional constraint and more recent signs of organizational renewal, which the article situates chronologically at the more-than-50-year mark since the 1973 coup.
Placing this analysis in comparative regional perspective, Chile's trajectory has long served as a reference point for debates about the relationship between authoritarian rule, structural adjustment, and civil society capacity elsewhere in Latin America and in other regions that underwent externally encouraged market liberalization. Where labor movements in countries such as Argentina and Brazil retained stronger sectoral bargaining traditions through their respective transitions, Chile's post-1990 democratic governments largely preserved the Plan Laboral's core architecture rather than dismantling it, a pattern the article appears to treat as central to explaining weak union density and fragmented collective bargaining in the decades since. This matters for the wider field of ODA and civil-society studies because donor and multilateral engagement with labor rights, decent-work programming, and civil-society strengthening in middle-income Latin American states cannot be evaluated in isolation from the underlying legal architecture governing unionization; a program that funds union capacity-building without addressing plant-level bargaining restrictions inherited from a labor code such as the Plan Laboral risks treating a symptom rather than the institutional cause.
For policy audiences, including development agencies and research institutes such as IOCSS that track civil society trends across regions, the article's implicit argument that authoritarian-era institutional design can outlast the authoritarian regime itself has direct relevance to how labor-rights components are designed within governance and civil-society-strengthening programming. If, as the article's framing suggests, more than 50 years after the coup the Plan Laboral's institutional legacy remains a live constraint on Chilean trade unionism, then policy interventions aimed at strengthening freedom of association or collective bargaining in Chile, or in comparable post-authoritarian contexts, need to engage directly with labor-code reform rather than assuming that formal democratization alone restores associational capacity. This has implications beyond Chile: research institutions monitoring civil-society space in post-transition states more broadly should treat legal-institutional continuity, not just regime type, as a primary variable when assessing the health of labor and civil-society organizations.
Looking forward, the article's attention to an "emerging revitalization" alongside the persistence of authoritarian legacies suggests a research agenda that practitioners and scholars should watch closely in the years following its July 2026 publication in Latin American Perspectives. Future comparative work will need to specify which sectors, regions, or generational cohorts within the Chilean labor movement are driving the revitalization the article identifies, and whether that renewal is producing pressure for further reform of the Plan Laboral's successor legislation. For researchers at institutions such as IOCSS engaged in comparative ODA and civil-society analysis, the Chilean case, anchored in the specific policy instrument of the 1979 Labor Plan and the historical marker of the 1973 coup, offers a concrete template for examining how authoritarian institutional legacies interact with democratic-era labor politics elsewhere in the region, and for testing whether formal democratic consolidation is sufficient, on its own, to restore the collective bargaining capacity that military-era labor codes were explicitly designed to suppress.