La inflación constitucional lleva a la devaluación del estado de derecho

Muy a cuento de las andanzas de Chávez en Venezuela y de su Chirolita Correa en Ecuador, interesante comentario sobre la manía tan latinoamericana de las reformas constitucionales permanentes:

The ever-expanding constitutions of many Latin American countries, both to strengthen strongmen (Chavez) and to add to the copious list of positive rights (Brazil). This is not good for either constitutionalism or rule of law because on the one hand you have the country’s founding document being changed at the whim of a single man and on the other a constitution bloated with such things as the fundamental right to, e.g., four weeks’ paid annual vacation decreases in legitimacy. To paraphrase an old Argentine lawyer who advised that country’s last significant amendment process in 1993-94, “constitutional inflation leads to rule of law devaluation.” Alternatively, the Latin American counterpart to the old saw about French constitutions being filed in libraries’ periodicals section is that Latin ones are filed as encyclopedias.

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The battle over political reform is no longer, if it ever was, between left and right or socialism and neoliberalism (the common Latin American term for pro-market policies and the Washington Consensus), but rather between democracy and authoritarianism. This may not represent that much of a change from the past — the populist governments that plagued the region in the 20th century could be alternately left or right wing — but it does confirm that the “consolidating democracy” project of the ’80s and ’90s has stalled if not taken a reverse. That is, the narrative that those of us studying Latin America in college and grad school in the late ’90s to early 2000s learned — the Third Wave of democratization, Latin America finally being on the right path but just needing time to grow economically – underestimated some nasty undercurrents of resistance.