"Attacking Labour: Latin American Workers from Military Dictatorships to the Neoliberal Transition"

In the course of the 1970s labour came to be violently attacked by the military dictatorships that took power across the region. Workers were arrested, tortured, and often killed in countries like Argentina, Brazil or Chile. This attack was part of a larger plan to restructure Latin American societies and eliminate the threat of unionised workers. Once military dictatorship lost power and the region transitioned to more or less imperfect democracies, the situation did not improve. In need of financial support to avoid a complete economic meltdown, Latin American countries, partly under the influence of international creditors such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) and Western commercial banks, adopted a series of economic policies to open their economies and redefine the role of the State after half a century of protectionism. Gradually, Latin American economies had to reduce barriers to entry, privatize state-owned enterprises and deregulate internal markets inaugurating a neo-liberal phase that would have a serious impact on the social fabric of most Latin American countries. The paper will rely on a wide range of recently-disclosed sources from North America and Latin America, including trade unions from Argentina and Brazil, to investigate how labour was systematically attacked in the course of the 1970s and, secondly, how democratisation did not coincide with an improvement in workers’ condition but, on the contrary, with a continued deterioration of their condition resulting in a gradual but steady dissatisfaction with democratic institutions in subsequent decades.