‘From democracy in Latin America’, by Santiago Muñoz Machado: wonderful mutation

The taxi driver’s response, between jactious and hopeless, remembers a different sense of time, also shows A relationship with the deranged state. Since when do these negative citizen perceptions appear? Why in the periodic studies that measure, in planetary terms, democratic quality and legal certainty, the nations that share a Hispanic origin usually go wrong, in the lower part of the list?

The eminent jurist, academic and researcher Santiago Muñoz Machado, in this extraordinary volume, lists without legendary, roses or black palliative, shadow and light zones in political and constitutional history, in the Spanish -American life of the last two centuries. His initial concern lies in the value of the rarity of democracy, face and fragile, as everyone should assume.

He then exposes his concern about the power of those who, constantly, renounce it, in order to erode and co -opt their institutions and modify their foundations, in a clientele, oligarchic or criminal sense. In this sense, it is a peculiar feature of Latin American republicanism the self -affirmative capacity that electoral processes have had, So, both in normalized democratic government situations, with division of powers, Autonomous Judicial Power and political alternation, and in the sad anomalies of so many dictatorships of breaking and shaking, to the most gross and bloodthirsty of the leaders has considered that it was ‘chosen by the people’ constituted a triumph and an obligation. Balazo clean If necessary, more would be missing.

The first chapter, ‘conspiracies and ideas for the Government of Hispanic America’, successfully explains the difficult transit from the Spanish eighteen reformism, with its background of old regime, capable of copening anything but the Napoleon tyrant, to the peninsular and imperial crisis of 1810. The second chapter, ‘A new political order for America’, whose first epigraph is entitled ‘The fabulous essay of establishing the same Constitution for the two hemispheres’, values ​​the investigations on the Constitution of Cádiz of 1812, the “wonderful mutation” of which Deputy Arguelles spoke, for the proclaimed equality “among all the subjects of his majesty that inhabit both worlds.”

From this point, Muñoz Machado enters with unusual versatility in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with four chapters that deal with novel political and legal ideas. The third deals with national states, fragmented sovereignty, territories and imprecise population; The caudillos room. Still identify periods and nations of democratic normality, The norm is the persistence of a “constitutional caudillismo”under which personal and exceptional forms of government become eternal.

The literary pages about some of them appear for delight (relative) of the reader, as in this allusion to the Bolivian Melgarejo: “It was not his a dizzying military career, but he was ascending validly giving himself much to the bosses and good disposition for difficult orders.” While the first half of the twentieth century is identified as an era of “Ephemeral validity of democracy” The second, “populism, militarism and democracy,” provides a proven vision of the impact of the toxic formulas of Argentine Peronism, so praised by certain fashion politicalologists.

The last chapter deals with the call “New constitutionalism” Latin American, Linked to an alleged pertinazing failure of liberal democracy, inapplicable as they maintain in neocolonial conditions or economic and cultural dependentism. Such a sancocho, a Latin American soup in which everything is mixed, finds in indigenism, increasingly globalized, a melting element and also a alibi. “It is necessary that the peoples of Latin America do not get carried away by illuminated leaders,” says the author. Difficult not to thank you such brave and sensible conclusions.