[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: 2026-10-08

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

이 요청(칠레 노동운동 학술논문 기반 분석 기사 작성)에는 ODA 제안서·보고서, 발표자료, 회의 보고서, 통화 기록 인용에 해당하는 스킬이 없습니다. 맞는 스킬이 없음을 밝히고 직접 작성합니다.

More than fifty years after General Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état of September 11, 1973, the question of how authoritarian institutional legacies continue to shape civil society organization remains strikingly relevant to scholars and practitioners of development and political economy. 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), addresses precisely this puzzle by tracing how the labor movement that was dismantled under Pinochet's 1973-1990 dictatorship has struggled, and only recently begun, to revitalize itself. This is not merely a historical retrospective; it speaks directly to contemporary debates about how durable authoritarian-era institutions can be even decades after a formal transition to democracy, a question with clear resonance for how international observers, including institutions like IOCSS that track civil society trajectories globally, assess the health of associational life in post-authoritarian states.

The article's central analytical thread runs through the Plan Laboral de 1979, the labor code imposed by the Pinochet regime in 1979, which the piece identifies as the pivotal institutional mechanism through which the dictatorship reconfigured Chilean industrial relations. Rather than simply banning unions outright, the Plan Laboral restructured collective bargaining at the enterprise level, fragmented union representation, and constrained the right to strike in ways designed to atomize worker organization and weaken class-based mobilization. The article's argument, as its title signals, is that these politico-economic and institutional changes did not evaporate with the return of elected government in 1990; instead, they left enduring legacies that continued to structure, and limit, Chilean trade unionism for decades afterward. This framing positions the Plan Laboral not as a transitional emergency measure but as a lasting architecture of labor relations whose logic persisted well into the democratic era, a finding consistent with broader scholarship on how authoritarian regimes often achieve their most durable effects through legal and institutional re-engineering rather than through repression alone.

Set against this institutional continuity, the article's reference to an "emerging revitalization" suggests that the piece also documents a countervailing dynamic: signs of renewed union mobilization and organizational rebuilding that have surfaced in Chile in more recent years. This dual narrative, of entrenched authoritarian legacy on one hand and incipient labor revitalization on the other, mirrors wider patterns observed across Latin America, where post-dictatorship and post-adjustment societies have seen cycles of social mobilization resurface after extended periods of demobilization. Chile itself became a global reference point for this kind of civil society resurgence with the mass social protests of October 2019, which forced a constitutional reform process and exposed deep public dissatisfaction with the socioeconomic model inherited from the Pinochet era. A fifty-years-later assessment of trade unionism published in Latin American Perspectives, a journal long associated with critical political economy analysis of the region, situates organized labor's trajectory within that same arc of delayed but eventually surfacing discontent with Pinochet-era structures.

For researchers and policy audiences working on ODA, civil society strengthening, and labor governance, the implications of this analysis are significant. Development institutions and donor agencies that fund civil society or labor-rights programming in Latin America frequently treat formal democratization, such as Chile's 1990 transition, as the marker after which associational freedoms are presumed to normalize. This article's focus on the Plan Laboral's lingering institutional effects complicates that assumption, suggesting that program design and policy dialogue in post-authoritarian contexts should account for sector-specific legal architectures, in this case labor codes, that can outlive the political regimes that created them. Programs aimed at strengthening union capacity, collective bargaining rights, or tripartite social dialogue in countries with comparable authoritarian pasts would benefit from the kind of institutional-legacy analysis this article offers, rather than treating "post-dictatorship" as a sufficient descriptor of a labor movement's actual organizational strength or legal protections.

Looking forward, this scholarship invites practitioners and researchers to treat the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 coup not as a closed historical marker but as an analytical vantage point from which to reassess how much of Pinochet-era institutional design still operates beneath Chile's democratic surface. For researchers, the article's publication in Latin American Perspectives in mid-2026 offers a timely data point for comparative work on labor movements across other Southern Cone and Latin American countries that experienced similar authoritarian restructuring of labor law. For practitioners engaged in civil society and labor-sector programming, the piece is a reminder that institutional legacies such as the Plan Laboral de 1979 can function as durable constraints on associational revitalization long after formal democratic consolidation, and that any assessment of union strength or civil society vibrancy in post-authoritarian Chile, or in comparable contexts, should be grounded in close attention to the specific legal and institutional architecture left behind rather than in broad assumptions about democratic transition itself.

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