Constitutional Change and Transformation in Latin America (original) (raw)

is usually depicted as a region whose democracies are fragile, 1 where political and economic instability has long spurred institutional breakdowns, 2 and where constitutions are replaced at an unusually rapid pace. 3 In the popular imagination, the region ' s hallmarks include coups, dictatorships, guerilla movements, persistent authoritarian legacies, deep social inequality and corruption infi ltrating all branches of government, but the most well-known may be the regularity of constitutional change. As Peter Smith has observed, ' there were 155 regime changes over the 101-year period from 1900 through 2000-a rate of 1.53 per year '. 4 Consider some examples. Th e Dominican Republic has had 34 constitutions. Venezuela has had 26 constitutions so far, and Ecuador is not too far behind: the 2008 Constitution was its twentieth. Since their independence, Latin American countries have written, in total, 197 constitutions, most of them from 1900 onwards, although this pace has waned in the last decades (from 1978 to 2017, there have been 18 new constitutions in the region). 5 Th e constitutional amendment rate is also high, though it does not diff er much from most established