Mirror Game: Welcome to the Future—The 1991 Constitution versus Neoliberalism

Abstract

This paper aims to set forth a critical perspective regarding the "implementation" of the 1991 Constitution, moving away from a legal analysis to delve into an examination grounded in critical political theory. To achieve this, I temporally situate the context of the constitutional text's emergence and link it to the advance of neoliberal globalization at the beginning of the 1990s. From this vantage point, I propose that there exists an encrypted neoliberal constitution which functions as a structural limitation on the deployment -supposedly plural and democratic- of our most recent constitution. This is largely because the capitalist axiomatic was not a central point of discussion in the National Constituent Assembly. This led to the promises of that constitutional text being confronted by this void in deliberation; a constitutive moment to create a new social order did not occur. Evidence of this is the establishment of an authoritarian liberalism in our country, which has reinforced the interests of capital in its neoliberal version over the last 25 years. Concurrently, it has produced a process of exclusion for a large part of society, increased social conflictivity, and precipitated a democratic decline. The events of the social uprising of April, May, and June 2021 demonstrate how the political Surface -institutional structures- proves incapable of understanding the political substratum -the emergence of new political subjects and new demands- which calls into question the democratic character not only of our State but also of our Constitution.