Constitution as Nationalism and Constitution as a Corporation: Decolonise and Dispense the Law

Constitutional engineering was part of the nineteenth century historical context in which liberalism and the structural axes of nation-states were built in Latin America.  The epistemic dependence of the ex-colonies was manifested in the adoption by criollos and mestizos who got into power of enlightened ideas that turned the new political institutions into a copy of the European ones.  Thus, Latin American constitutions were built as emancipatory and regulatory agendas within a specific vision of society. Nowadays, this phenomenon tends to be re-enacted and radicalized through public policies related to extractivism and the environment, along with the dictates of corporations, and in the background of the institutional weakness of Latin American states. In this context, dispensing the law and decolonizing the Constitution are two guiding scripts for Latin American projects in the 21st century.