Constitution in Latin America

The essay proposes a postcolonial approach to the history of the concept of “constitution” in Latin America both analyzing the influence of constitutional precedents such as those of the United States, France and Cádiz on the Latin American constitutional processes, and by showing how the colonial past survived both after independence and within Latin American political modernity. In this way, it is challenged the notion that the Latin American experience followed the route of “constitutionalism” – the progressive expansion of individual rights granted by the constitution against the abuse of political power – conceived in ideal terms as a “technique of freedom”. It is rather suggested that, to understand Latin American constitutions, it is necessary to examine the numerous governmental strategies enforced to produce the material conditions of a constitutional order, thus revealing the nature of constitutionalism as an “order-imposing discourse.” The Latin American constitutional experience is, therefore, regarded not as an “exception” to political modernity but as a useful perspective for understanding the transformations that affect the modern notion of “constitution” when contemporary processes of globalization compel us to call its historical conditions into question.