The Paradox of Apolitical Professionalism: The Bar Association and Political Repression in Chile, 1920s-1950s

This article studies how the organized Chilean legal profession responded to political repression between the 1920s and the 1950s. The research shows that, threatened by partisan politics, the Chilean Bar Association came to define itself as an “apolitical” and purely professional organization in order to ensure the cohesion of the guild. The elitist and mostly rightwing leadership of the Bar was reluctant to engage publicly in any politically-tainted action, including the defense of the victims of political persecution. Nevertheless, the pressure of its constituency to uphold the principle of professional solidarity forced the Bar to privately intercede in favor of politically persecuted lawyers, including Communist lawyers targeted during the early Cold War years. Still, in order to justify this intervention, both the Bar leadership and the Communist lawyers seeking the Bar’s protection framed their discourse in the narrow framework of the professional rights of lawyers, discarding a broader action in favor of the civil and political rights of the general citizenry. Therefore, in mid-twentieth-century Chile, the impossible project to transcend partisan politics through the discourse of apolitical legal professionalism curtailed rather buttressed the defense of rights and liberties. By exploring the complex relationship between lawyers and politics through the prism of the Chilean Bar Association, this piece contributes to the social and cultural history of lawyers in Latin America, to the broader sociological and historical debates on the relationship between lawyers and political liberalism, and to the history of human rights.