Autor(es): Rodrigo Cordero
Otro(a)s Autore(a)s: Ricardo Valenzuela
Año: 2025
Revista: THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY
Referencia:
Cordero, R., & Valenzuela, R. (2025). Mining legal meaning: the neoliberal foundations of extractivist constitutionalism in Chile. Third World Quarterly, 1–20.
This article examines the formation of an extractivist legal culture in Chile through the lens of ‘economic public order’ (EPO), a constitutional doctrine that has played a pivotal role in embedding neoliberal legality within the country’s juridical framework. Tracing its origins to the counterrevolutionary response to Salvador Allende’s socialist legality and the broader global struggles over economic sovereignty in the 1970s, the paper argues that EPO extends beyond the governance of natural resources to function as an ideological mechanism of interpretative control. By codifying economic values as generative principles of legality and constitutional rights, EPO has sustained an extractivist logic that permeates legal education, doctrinal knowledge, and judicial decision-making. The article reconstructs how EPO became entrenched as a grammar of interpretation and how its resilience is maintained through law textbooks and legal pedagogy. In doing so, it contributes to the broader debate on extractivist constitutionalism in Latin America by demonstrating how legal cultures serve as critical infrastructures for the reproduction of extractive power and the foreclosure of alternative economic imaginaries. Finally, the paper explores contemporary challenges to move beyond extractivist legal cultures in the Global South.
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