Abstract

This paper comments on one aspect of Roberto Gargarella’s critical approach to the evolution of constitutional reforms in Latin America: the inclusion of constitutional rights without redistributing institutional power. His proposal to transform the Latin American constitutionalism is to improve the collective dialogue between state powers, and between these powers and the citizenry. I suggest that Gargarella neglects the relevance of reviewing the conception of constitutional rights too, since such reconsideration may contribute to unblock designs which end up preserving social inequalities without enabling political resistance to them. In this vein, I propose substituting the traditional understanding of constitutional rights as barriers or trumps for the idea of rights as mandatory goals or optimization requirements. In the paper I point out some advantages of this revised conception as compared to the liberal perspective, and explain why it may be helpful in strengthening the egalitarian constitutional project.