Wiki-Constitutionalism

Last year, Hugo Chavez amended Venezuela's constitution and abolished term limits. The entire business was a bit odd, but not because the constitution was changed, which is quite common in Latin America. Nor was it because the changes involved extended his rule (which is equally common). No, what was unusual about the constitutional reform of 2009 was that abolishing term-limits was all it did.

You see, constitutions are uniquely plastic in Latin America. Not only are presidents exceptionally powerful here—I live in Caracas, and it is not at all uncommon to turn on the television to find El Comandante on every TV channel, explaining currency valuations or riot control measures or energy crises or international weather phenomena as if he himself was the entirety of the government and all of its ministries—but, in addition, Latin American leaders have a nasty habit of rewriting their countries' constitutions more than anywhere else in the world.

This is a phenomenon I call "Wiki-constitutionalism." In Latin America, constitutions are changed with great frequency and unusual ease (though not through any open-source collaborative process), as if they were Wikipedia pages. The evidence is staggering: The Dominican Republic has had 32 separate constitutions since its independence in 1821. Venezuela follows close behind with 26, Haiti has had 24, Ecuador 20, and Bolivia recently passed its seventeenth. In fact, over half of the 21 Latin American nations have had at least ten constitutions while, in the rest of the world, only Thailand (17), France (16), Greece (13), and Poland (10) have reached double digits. And the process occurs under governments of every political stripe—not just socialist ones like those of Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales. Gruff conservatives like Colombia's Alvaro Uribe and friendly, doting moderates like the Dominican Republic's Leonel Fernandez have joined the party too, attempting to tear up and revise their constitutionally-mandated term limits. (It's important to distinguish between amending and rewriting. Constitutional amendments are common all over the world, but Latin America's rewrite-mania is truly eccentric: Venezuela, for instance, has adopted 26 new constitutions, but amended an existing one only thrice.)

Many of these rewrites go beyond term limits, however. Chavez’s constitution of 1999 disbanded the upper house of the legislature, rearranged the lower house, separated authority among five "powers" (including citizens and electoral councils, as well as the usual legislature, executive, and judiciary), and redesigned and renamed nearly all government ministries. The result was the same thing that nearly always emerges from such restructurings: a significantly strengthened executive in direct control of oil revenues, judicial appointments, and an increasingly rubber-stamp National Assembly. It was the institution of the presidency that emerged intact, recognizable, and all the stronger from the restructuring process—meanwhile the other institutions had to start at square one, lacking the institutional legitimacy, memory, relationships, and mandate necessary to govern independently. This type of dictatorial redesign is a grand tradition among the region's caudillos, the iconic strongmen, dating all the way back to the liberator of South America, Simon Bolivar.

And yet, despite their authoritarian intentions, modern-day caudillos approach the process of constitutional revision with a certain delicacy. Constitutions rarely include provisions for their own destruction, so replacing them in the absence of a massive social upheaval can be tricky. There was a time when the Trujillos, Gómezes, and Somozas of this world could create constitutions through sheer force of personality, but, nowadays, leaders generally attempt to legitimize them through plebiscites. Using state funds, they launch massive media campaigns extolling how their new documents are “the best in the world” (Ecuador’s Rafael Correa) or that they will solve “all the [country's] problems” (Bolivia’s Evo Morales).