[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: 2026-10-04
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
No existing skill in my configured set (oda-master-writer, oda-word-writer, oda-hwpx-writer, kofih-consulting-proposal, oda-ppt-design, plaud-meeting-report, call-meeting-records) covers writing an analytical commentary on an academic journal article — this falls outside ODA proposal/report writing, presentations, meeting reports, and call-record citation. Proceeding directly per the task instructions.
More than fifty years after the September 1973 coup that installed Augusto Pinochet, the question of how authoritarian-era institutions continue to shape labor politics in Chile remains strikingly current, and a new article in Latin American Perspectives brings this question back into sharp focus. Published in Volume 53, Issue 4 (July 2026, pages 67–87) under the title "Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d'État," the piece arrives at a moment when Chile continues to grapple with the unfinished project of constitutional and labor reform that followed the mass mobilizations of 2019. For an institute like IOCSS, which tracks how political ruptures reverberate through civil society organizations over the long term, Chile offers one of the clearest cases in Latin America of how a dictatorship's labor code can outlive the dictatorship itself by decades, constraining union capacity long after formal democratic transition.
The article's central analytical move is to trace the institutional architecture that the Pinochet regime (1973–1990) imposed on organized labor, with particular attention to the Plan Laboral de 1979, the 1979 Labor Plan that restructured collective bargaining, union registration, and strike rights in ways designed to atomize and depoliticize the Chilean labor movement. Rather than treating this as a closed historical episode, the piece positions the 1979 reform as a living institutional legacy, one whose logic of enterprise-level bargaining and restricted union federation persisted through the post-1990 democratic governments and continues to condition labor relations today. This framing matters because it resists a simple before-and-after narrative of dictatorship and democracy; instead, it asks how specific legal instruments survive regime change and continue to structure the bargaining power of workers, unions, and employers across subsequent decades of Chilean political life.
Read alongside broader regional trends, the Chilean case illuminates a pattern familiar to scholars of Latin American political economy: authoritarian regimes across the Southern Cone frequently left behind labor codes, property regimes, and constitutional provisions engineered to outlast the dictatorships that wrote them. Chile's experience is distinctive, however, because of the depth and durability of the Plan Laboral, which has made Chilean labor law a recurring reference point in comparative debates about neoliberal institution-building under authoritarian rule. The article's attention to "emerging revitalization" alongside persistent authoritarian legacies also resonates with recent Chilean political developments—most notably the cycle of social mobilization that began in October 2019 and the subsequent, ultimately unsuccessful, constitutional reform processes—suggesting that union revitalization efforts have unfolded in tandem with, and partly in response to, this broader wave of contentious politics over the institutional inheritance of the dictatorship.
For researchers and policy practitioners concerned with ODA, civil society strengthening, and labor governance, the article carries implications that extend beyond Chile's borders. Development agencies and civil society support programs operating in post-authoritarian contexts often treat formal democratization as sufficient grounds for assuming that civic and labor organizations will recover their pre-authoritarian strength; the Chilean case, as analyzed through the lens of the 1979 Labor Plan's persistence, cautions against this assumption. Where institutional legacies of repression are embedded in statutory law rather than merely in political culture, civil society revitalization requires targeted legal and policy reform, not simply the passage of time or the holding of elections. This has direct relevance for how international observers and funders assess trade union capacity-building initiatives in other countries that have transitioned from authoritarian rule, since institutional legacy effects of the kind documented in Chile may be underestimated in program design that focuses primarily on organizational training rather than on the surrounding legal architecture.
Looking forward, the article's framing at the fifty-year mark since the coup invites both reflection and a research agenda. For scholars, it suggests the value of longitudinal, institutionally grounded studies that track how specific authoritarian-era statutes—rather than authoritarianism as a diffuse historical condition—shape contemporary civil society outcomes, a method that could be extended to other Latin American cases with comparable dictatorship-era labor codes. For practitioners engaged in labor rights advocacy or ODA-funded civil society programming in Chile and similar contexts, the piece underscores that genuine union revitalization will likely depend on sustained legal reform efforts targeting the residual architecture of instruments like the Plan Laboral de 1979, rather than on civic enthusiasm alone. As Chile continues to debate the shape of its post-dictatorship institutional order, this analysis of the trade union movement offers a concrete empirical anchor for understanding why some authoritarian legacies prove far more durable than the regimes that created them, and what it might take to finally dislodge them.