El Leviatán de papel: legalismo autocrático y erosión del pacto constitucional en América Latina

This essay examines a paradox that has run through Latin America since the Andean constitution-making wave of 2008 and 2009: the region has some of the most ambitious rights-based constitutions in the world, yet it is witnessing processes of democratic erosion led by elected rulers. The aim is to analyze how the tools of constitutional law itself, including amendment, constituent assemblies, judicial review, states of emergency and the language of human rights, have been used to concentrate power. Drawing on the literature on abusive constitutionalism and on the case law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the essay proposes the category of constitutional mimicry to describe regimes that preserve the legal forms of democracy while emptying them of content. It argues that the persistence of a hyper-presidential design, together with the regional reliance on rewriting the text as a way out of political conflict, made this capture possible. The analysis covers the co-optation of courts, the dissolution of term limits, the militarization of public security, extractivism, digital surveillance and the anti-gender backlash. It concludes that defending democracy requires shifting attention from the catalogue of rights to the independence of those who interpret them.