UC Berkeley

In this work, the author offers a new perspective of the Constitutional Reform in Latin America in the period of 1980-2000. Between those years, almost every single Latin American country reformed (totally or at least substantially) their national constitution. This reform period has been seen, in the traditional literature, as characterize for the adoption of reforms based on the “public interest”, with a combination of free-market and wealth rights which was optimal for development. The author, instead, proposes that the reform was implemented based in rhetoric that trumps the debate, independently of if these interests coincide or not with ideologies of the “left” (progressive rhetoric) or of the “right” (sometime identified with some parts of the “rule of Law” rhetoric of the World Bank often called the “Washington Consensus”).

In the first part of the investigation, the progressive rhetoric arguments are presented, both in theory and applied to a specific case (higher education regulations). In the sec-ond chapter, the constitutional reform is studied focused in the case of Peru. It is im-portant to note that Peru has largely been considered the Latin American country that most adopted the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal ideology, therefore, its study seems particularly important. In the third chapter, the scope is extended to the whole region, where the author reviews the economic chapters of each Latin American constitution, before and after the reform. At last, he attempts to answer the question: How an “optimal” constitution looks? In doing that, rather than trying to designing a universal constitution for the region, he offers some parameters of what can be regarded as opti-mal norms, so it can help future constitutional reform endeavors in the region or else-where.