Springs, Courts and Dollars

A panoramic analysis on political crises in contemporary Latin America (1990-2020)

Abstract

The article analyse three forms of intervention on institutional politics in situations of political crises in contemporary Latin America: the relatively sudden irruption of multitudinous protests with popular, oppositional and citizen identity (‘springs’); the intervention of accountability institutions (‘courts’); and the interference on representation as a result of capital flight risk (‘dollars’). It presents a historical mapping of 37 episodes of political crises in 15 countries in the region between 1990 and 2020, framing them as exceptional circumstances of blockade in usual expediency of the political system. Reviewing those cases and the literature on institutional crises, it develops the meaning of ‘springs’, ‘courts’, and ‘dollars’, discarding the hypothesis that they represent  a somehow transitory stage in democratic consolidation. Instead, two arguments unfold: first, that the ‘unarmed’ character of such interventions is a discontinuity in Latin American history, in contrast to the predominantly armed forms of political disruption; second, beyond critical junctures, these unarmed interventions generate effects even when they do not occur, shaping practices, expectations and boundaries of liberal democracy in the region.