The legacy of military interventions and authoritarism in Latin America has produced the unstable democracies that characterize the region. A distinctive feature of this legacy is the prevalence of a system of military justice that, in practice, became a forum for legalizing impunity and arbitrariness. Constitutional courts, by and large an institutional innovation of the last round of transitions to democracy, are transforming military justice and civic-military relations in the region. But not always for the better. Whereas in some countries these courts have introduced and strengthened the principles of constitutionalism, in others they have updated and even expanded an old jurisprudence of impunity and lack of accountability.
Why some Latin American constitutional courts have limited the scope and the autonomy of military justice while others have expanded it? This paper argues that the judicial reforms that empower and make judges independent effect their behavior only under specific social and political conditions. The implications of the proposed theory of conditional effects of institutional incentives on judicial behavior are explored in depth in the cases of Colombia, Peru, and Mexico. In addition, a preliminary region-wide statistical analysis tests whether the theoretical insights are valid for other countries in the region and for de facto independent judicial behavior over a broader set of rights-related cases that are decided by constitutional courts.
