[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: 2026-10-02
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
이 글은 ODA 제안서나 보고서, 발표자료, 회의 기록이 아니라 학술 기사 기반의 분석 칼럼 작성 요청이어서, 지침에 명시된 스킬(oda-master-writer, oda-ppt-design, plaud-meeting-report, call-meeting-records) 중 해당하는 것이 없습니다. 이를 먼저 밝히고, 바로 작성하겠습니다.
More than half a century after the military coup of September 11, 1973, Chile remains a central case for understanding how authoritarian institutional engineering can outlast the regime that created it, and why that durability matters for contemporary debates on labor rights, democratization, and civil society organizing across Latin America. A newly published article in Latin American Perspectives, titled "Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d'État" (Volume 53, Issue 4, pages 67-87, July 2026), returns to this question at a moment when global attention to shrinking civic space, labor precarity, and the fragility of post-authoritarian democratic settlements has intensified. The article's framing—measuring the distance traveled since 1973 while asking whether revitalization is genuinely underway—gives it immediate relevance for IOCSS's broader mandate of tracking how civil society actors navigate the residue of authoritarian rule in development contexts worldwide.
The article's core analytical move is to trace how the politico-economic and institutional architecture imposed under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) continues to structure Chilean trade unionism today. Central to this argument is the Plan Laboral de 1979 (the 1979 Labor Plan), the labor code engineered under military rule that fragmented collective bargaining, weakened union federations, and institutionalized a decentralized, enterprise-level bargaining model designed explicitly to prevent the kind of sector-wide labor mobilization that had characterized Chilean politics before 1973. By anchoring its analysis in this specific legal instrument, the article avoids the trap of treating authoritarian legacy as a diffuse cultural residue; instead, it identifies a concrete institutional mechanism—one still partially intact in Chilean labor law decades after the transition to democracy—through which the dictatorship's economic logic persists. This is a methodologically significant choice: it allows the authors to distinguish between formal democratization (the end of military rule in 1990) and substantive institutional continuity (the survival of Pinochet-era labor architecture), a distinction with wide applicability beyond Chile.
Situated within broader regional and global trends, the Chilean case illuminates a pattern familiar to scholars of ODA and civil society studies: authoritarian regimes frequently leave behind not just human rights violations but durable institutional settlements that outlive formal regime change, constraining the associational and bargaining power of civil society actors long after transitions to democracy are declared complete. Chile is often cited internationally as a success story of market-oriented reform and democratic consolidation, yet the article's focus on trade unionism as a site of unresolved authoritarian legacy complicates that narrative considerably. This resonates with comparative literature on Southern Cone labor movements under neoliberal restructuring, and it also speaks to a wider concern among development institutions and civil society observatories: that formal democratic indicators—elections, constitutional government, civilian oversight—can coexist with labor and associational structures still shaped by authoritarian design, limiting the depth of civic participation that donors and multilateral institutions often assume accompanies democratization.
For researchers and practitioners working on governance, labor rights, and civil society strengthening in ODA-recipient and middle-income countries alike, the article's emphasis on the "emerging revitalization" of Chilean unionism—set against the persistence of the 1979 Labor Plan's institutional constraints—carries direct policy significance. It suggests that programs aimed at strengthening labor and civil society organizations in post-authoritarian settings cannot rely solely on political transition benchmarks; they must also assess whether sector-specific legal frameworks inherited from prior regimes continue to cap organizational capacity. This has implications for how international development actors design technical assistance and institutional reform components tied to labor governance, particularly in contexts where, as in Chile, the formal end of dictatorship (1990) did not automatically trigger reform of the economic and institutional scaffolding built during it. Policy dialogues on labor law reform, collective bargaining rights, and union federation capacity-building would benefit from treating such legacy instruments as discrete, named targets for reform rather than folding them into generic democratization indicators.
Looking forward, the article's framing at the "more than 50 years since the coup" mark invites practitioners and researchers to treat 2026 not merely as a commemorative anniversary but as an analytical checkpoint for assessing whether the signs of revitalization it identifies in Chilean trade unionism are translating into durable institutional change or remain contingent and reversible. For IOCSS's comparative work on civil society trajectories under authoritarian legacies, the Chilean case—anchored concretely in the Plan Laboral de 1979 and the Pinochet period—offers a template for examining other countries where formal democratic transition has not been accompanied by parallel reform of labor or associational law. Future research building on this article would do well to track whether Chile's current labor reform debates succeed in dismantling the specific 1979 provisions the article identifies, since that outcome would offer a rare, measurable test of whether authoritarian institutional legacies can in fact be reversed through democratic politics rather than merely managed around.