[LAP] Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d’État

Source: Latin American Perspectives  |  Published: 2026-09-30

Category: 정권·선거 변동  |  Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional

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More than five decades after the September 1973 coup that installed Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship, Chile continues to grapple with the institutional residue of that rupture, and nowhere is this more visible than in the country's labor relations regime. As global attention increasingly turns to the durability of authoritarian legal architectures even after democratic transitions—from post-Soviet Eastern Europe to post-Suharto Indonesia—Chile offers one of the longest-running natural experiments in this phenomenon. A 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," scheduled for Volume 53, Issue 4 (July 2026), pages 67-87, takes up this question directly by examining how the politico-economic and institutional changes imposed during the 1973-1990 dictatorship continue to shape Chilean trade unionism today. The timing of the piece, appearing in the year marking 53 years since the coup, situates it within a broader reckoning underway in Chilean civil society and scholarship about which authoritarian-era structures have proven resistant to reform even under successive democratic governments.

At the analytical core of the article is the Plan Laboral de 1979, the 1979 Labor Plan promulgated under the Pinochet regime, which the article identifies as the decisive institutional mechanism through which the dictatorship reengineered Chilean labor relations. Rather than treating authoritarian repression of unions as a temporary phenomenon confined to the years of most intense state violence, the article's framing suggests that the Plan Laboral established a legal and organizational architecture—governing collective bargaining scope, strike rights, and union fragmentation—that was designed to outlast the dictatorship itself. This is a critical distinction: it shifts the analytical focus from Pinochet-era repression as an event to Pinochet-era labor law as a structure, one embedded deeply enough in Chile's post-1990 democratic institutions that it has proven remarkably resistant to the sequence of center-left and center-right governments that followed the transition. The article's explicit engagement with "institutional" legacies, as reflected in its keyword framing, positions the Plan Laboral alongside Chile's 1980 Constitution as one of the dictatorship's most consequential and enduring exports into democratic Chile.

This argument resonates with wider patterns across Latin America and other regions where authoritarian regimes used labor and economic law as instruments of long-term political engineering rather than mere emergency measures. Chile's experience under the Plan Laboral parallels debates in other post-authoritarian contexts—Brazil's corporatist labor code inherited from the Vargas era and partially preserved through the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, or South Korea's labor relations framework shaped by decades of developmental authoritarianism—where union movements have had to organize within legal architectures never designed for genuine associational freedom. What distinguishes the Chilean case, and what the article's title signals through its juxtaposition of "authoritarian legacies" with "emerging revitalization," is the claim that despite this durable institutional constraint, Chilean trade unionism is now showing signs of renewal. This framing matters for scholars of civil society and political economy because it resists a purely deterministic reading in which institutional legacies permanently foreclose collective action; instead, it treats the more than 50 years since the coup as a long arc in which structural constraint and organizational agency have coexisted in tension.

For researchers and practitioners engaged with official development assistance and civil society strengthening, the article's implications extend beyond Chile's borders. Labor rights and freedom of association are core components of the International Labour Organization's decent work agenda and are frequently embedded as conditionalities or indicators in ODA-funded governance and civil society programs across Latin America. An analysis grounded in the specific mechanics of the 1979 Labor Plan offers donors and program designers a concrete case study in why formal democratic transition—Chile's return to elected government in 1990—does not automatically translate into the dismantling of authoritarian-origin institutions. Programs aimed at strengthening trade unions or civil society organizations in post-authoritarian settings would benefit from the article's implicit lesson: that institutional reform of labor law, not merely political liberalization, is often the binding constraint on associational revitalization. This has direct relevance for how international observatories and development institutions such as IOCSS assess the health of civil society in countries transitioning away from authoritarian rule, since formal electoral democracy can mask persistent institutional authoritarianism in specific policy domains like labor relations.

Looking forward, the article's publication in Latin American Perspectives—a journal with a long track record of critical political economy scholarship on Latin America—invites researchers to treat the Chilean trade union movement as an ongoing case study rather than a settled historical episode. The more than five decades since the 1973 coup provide enough temporal distance to assess not only the immediate repression of the Pinochet years but the slower, more consequential process by which the Plan Laboral de 1979 became embedded in Chile's democratic institutional fabric. For practitioners working on labor rights, civil society support, or democratic institution-building in Latin America and other post-authoritarian regions, the piece is a reminder that revitalization of civil society actors like trade unions is possible even under adverse institutional legacies, but that such revitalization should be read as a contested and partial process rather than a completed transition. Future comparative work—linking Chile's experience to other cases of authoritarian-origin institutional durability—would further clarify whether the "emerging revitalization" the article identifies represents a durable structural shift or a more contingent, conjunctural opening within a still-constraining legal order.

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