Abstract

This article studies how the organized Chilean legal profession responded to political repression between the 1920s and the 1950s. Based on the archives of the Chilean Bar Association, the research shows that the traditional elite who led the Chilean Bar felt threatened by a diversifying legal community, and particularly, by the increasingly contentious role of partisan politics in the profession. The Chilean Bar thus came to define itself as an “apolitical” professional organization to ensure the cohesion of the guild. As a result, the Bar was reluctant to engage publicly in the defense of the victims of political persecution. Nevertheless, the pressure 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, both the Bar leadership and the Communist lawyers seeking the Bar’s protection framed their discourse in the narrow framework of lawyers’ professional rights, discarding a broader action in favor of the general citizenry’s civil and political rights. Therefore, the Chilean Bar Association’s discourse of apolitical legal professionalism curtailed rather than buttressed the defense of civil rights and liberties.