The Latin American and Caribbean region represents 33 countries. The Caribbean countries except the Dominican Republic and Haiti base their legal system on the Common Law of England. Therefore, the constitutional texts have much less importance in the domestic legal system than the custom of observing the law. The rest have judicial systems based on Roman law and Napoleonic codes. In all these nations, constituent processes have been resorted to whenever political development requires the renewal of the social pact that each of these republics is protected by. Consequently, each nation created by Spain or Portugal has experienced at least three constituent processes since the 19th century.
None of them have led to the establishment of free societies; secure and prosperous. But every time the political game gets stuck, a constituent process is resorted to. And of course, over the years the text becomes a kind of libel against the ruling elites who never manage to put the constitutional text into practice. And the reason for this inefficiency is simple: it is not possible to execute the Latin American constitutional texts because they are not constitutions but regulations and because they do not represent a base of available resources to finance the public services that are enshrined therein.
From the end of the 1980s, Latin America began a period that has already lasted thirty years of modifications to constitutional texts. In the process, the texts of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela have changed. On each occasion, the rationale for the changes was the need to accommodate emerging groups and strip civil society of the anti-democratic straitjacket that impeded development. Thirty years later, the region is full of constitutional texts that have increased the power of the state, restricted the freedoms of civil society and offered a set of panaceas that public budgets are unable to provide.
The text that will be submitted for the consideration of the Chilean people on September 4 of this year satisfies the ancestral Latin American format. It is not a constitutional text but a complex regulation in which the citizen must submit to an intrusive and paralyzing control of the state. And, as in the past, it creates a set of legal, institutional and personality figures that is very difficult, if not impossible, to defray with the taxes paid in Chile. Finally, like all Latin American constitutional texts, it is punitive, forgetting that human beings are motivated by incentives. In short, the text is more of the same disaster that has prevailed in the region for 500 years. And of course as Einstein said “there is nothing more absurd than repeating wrong procedures and expecting good results to come out”.
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