The autoritarian legacy in Police Reform in Chile's Transition to Democracy (1973-2000)

Abstract

This article examines how police institutions adapt to and survive transitions to democracy, with a focus on the Chilean case as a paradigmatic instance of institutional shielding. Using a historical institutionalist framework and in-depth case analysis, it reconstructs the causal sequence through which Carabineros accumulated political power during the Pinochet dictatorship, managed its own internal transition before the return to democratic rule, and successfully blocked substantive human rights reforms throughout the 1990s. The analysis shows that the scope of pro-rights police reform depends on three interacting factors: the level of institutional shielding inherited from the authoritarian period, the architecture of the political system, and the degree of consensus achieved around human rights. Chile's case illustrates that democratic governments did not fail to reform the police out of political indifference, but because they inherited an institution that had deliberately built the conditions for its own survival — arriving at democracy more empowered than weakened.

Keywords: Police reform; Transitional justice; Authoritarian legacies; Institutional shielding; Democratic transition.