Progressive Governments and Trade Unionism in Latin America: The Cases of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay GONZALO D. MARTNER Introduction Trade unions went from being illegal organizations in the mid-nineteenth century to socio-political forces. Together with political parties they helped to build central institutions in modern capitalist societies. They were also, throughout most of the twentieth century, an integral part of the institutional workings of systems of industrial relations, especially since World War II in the capitalist West and some of its peripheries, such as Latin America. Unions subsequently experienced a widespread crisis in the 1980s, followed by a precarious restructuring process(De la Garza, 1993). Latin America in the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has undergone a process that bears certain similarities with the »double movement« described by Karl Polanyi in his analysis of the wave of late nineteenth-century European liberalism. The author of The Great Transformation(1944) viewed this process – which arose in reaction to the liberalization of markets and in which the first workers’ movements played a key part – as a form of resistance to the»uprooting« of the econ­omy from society. The trend towards the establishment of flexible markets amid technological change brought on by the Industrial Revolution produced, in the first half of the twentieth century, a counterpart: a multi­farious reaction to the ruptures that the rapid expansion of the markets caused in people’s lives and the existing social balance. The rupturing of the social fabric was also keenly felt in Latin America from the 1960s onwards and has led to an alternation between neoliberal liberalization, on the one hand, and widespread rejection of the Washington Consensus model and automatic alignment with the United States, on the other (although Colombia and Mexico have maintained conservative govern­ments due to the violent penetration of drug trafficking in political life). The political result has been a shift towards»progressive governments,« which has found expression in the emergence of radical social movements 136 Martner, Progressive Governments and Trade Unionism ipg 2/2011