The Robe and the Ballot
Across Latin America, constitutional courts have quietly become the most fought-over terrain in politics. Presidents who swept to power on large mandates have discovered that the bench — unelected, unmandated, often derided as elitist — is the one institution capable of telling them no.
The pattern is consistent enough to feel structural. In Guatemala, the Constitutional Court blocked moves that would have shielded politically connected figures from prosecution, surviving enormous pressure from both the outgoing and incoming administrations. In Bolivia, the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal became a battlefield over whether Evo Morales could legally seek a fourth term — a question that ultimately fed the crisis of 2019. In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele removed all five Constitutional Chamber magistrates of the Supreme Court as his party's new legislature took office in 2021, and the reconstituted bench promptly cleared the way for his re-election bid, inverting the usual story.
That inversion matters. Courts are not inherently virtuous; they are institutional. When captured, they ratify power rather than check it. The distinction between a court defending constitutionalism and a court that has been packed to endorse it is, in practice, the whole question — and it is one that increasingly turns on international pressure and domestic civil society rather than on the courts themselves.
The regional trend that makes this urgent is the weakening of legislatures. Across the continent, assemblies have grown fragmented, gridlocked, or subordinated to executive patronage. Where parliament cannot discipline the president, courts become the default checkpoint. That gives them outsized importance — and makes them a target. An executive calculating how to consolidate power knows that neutralizing the bench is worth more than winning a hundred parliamentary votes.
What protects a court is rarely the text of a constitution alone. It is the cost that a government pays for attacking one: legal costs in treaty bodies, financial costs from ratings agencies and bilateral partners, political costs from a public that, polling consistently shows, trusts courts more than it trusts executives. None of those costs is guaranteed, but they are real.
Latin America's constitutional courts are neither saviors nor obstacles. They are pressure gauges — readings of how much institutional air a political system still holds. Right now, across the region, several gauges are flashing.