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INTRODUCTION
Since the nineteenth century, Latin American constitutions have included provisions allowing presidents or legislatures to suspend the rule of law in times of crisis.1 Throughout Latin American history, these emergency powers were used as ordinary tools not only by military dictatorships2 but also by democratic governments.3 As a result, emergency powers have become a central topic in the constitutional debates of Latin American jurists and political elites. This article suggests that nineteenth century constitutional thinkers justified emergency powers using at least two different rhetorics, discourses, or sets of arguments-each of which stressed the idea of Latin American backwardness. The first rhetoric argued that Latin American people were vicious and thus the rule of law could not be applied until the population acquired necessary republican virtues. The second claimed that governments should establish strong executive powers in their Constitution in order to lead Latin American countries toward a path of economic prosperity. Both of these discourses imagined Latin America as a backward region where the application of law had to be delayed for an uncertain period of time, until either republican virtues or economic prosperity were achieved. However, "backwardness" is not only an objective description of a particular population or territory, but especially a condition from which nineteenth century Latin American constitutional thinkers derived the need for broad emergency powers. This paper does not empirically verify whether Latin American backwardness was "false," but rather argues that the "backwardness argument" improperly skewed the interpretation of emergency powers in the region's constitutional thought.
This historical reconstruction of nineteenth century constitutional thought has three different goals. First, this article highlights the centrality of emergency powers in constitutional design. The suspension of a constitution is not only a tool that one must understand to grasp how constitutional regimes deal with exceptional circumstances. Rather, one may claim that theoretical discourses around emergency powers can help identify the deep fears of liberal constitutionalism and the ways in which such fears are addressed.4 This article shows how Latin American jurists in the nineteenth century explicitly acknowledged the fundamental character of emergency powers in the building of their republics.
The second goal of this article is to intervene in a theoretical debate that has traditionally excluded the so-called "Third World," leading jurists...