Blog Post #6: Week 6

In this week's blog post I was particularly interested in the concept of constitutionalism in Latin America. In my perspective, constitutions are the backbone of citizenship and studying the way laws and first principles have been forged in Latin America will give us a comprehensive understanding of the rule of law in this region.

To study this, I read Mirrow's Latin American Constitutions. This book provided me with a comprehensive historical study of the concept of constitutionalism in Latin America. It ventures out from the independence period (similar to the ones we studied in Week 4) to the current day. One of the most important focus areas of the book is the Constitution of Cadiz. After coming across this topic, I shifted my focus to this document.

The Constitution of Cádiz or the Spanish Constitution of 1812 has an important place in the development of liberal constitutionalism in Europe and Latin America. It also played a very big role in the independence of many Latin American republics. This is because in Cádiz. “The American
question” involved issues of the representation of American populations and the citizenship of indigenous populations. Whether various populations counted for purposes of representation was debated with concern and passion in this document. Just as the United States Constitution was forced to consider issues of slaves, slavery, and the slave trade, so too we find these issues at the forefront of the American question in Cádiz, Spain.

I would like to argue that these constitutional ideas and experiences were brought back to Latin America countries, many of which were already well on the path to complete independence.