ABSTRACT
This article proposes an interpretation of the permanence of the transplanted ideas thesis in Latin America. To do so, going beyond hermeneutic issues, the article focuses on the profile of its three main defenders – opponents, liberals, and intellectuals – and on their different strategies with respect to liberalism and modernity. For the former, liberal ideas are foreign to Latin America and the attempt to implement them would naturally cause resistance. For the second group, liberal ideas – which were organic in Europe and in line with the needs of expansion by capitalism – would have proved powerless in the face of the reality of the people of this region. For the latter, the delay between ideas and reality would be permanent due to different processes of historical concealment of the true being of these people. This heterogeneous conjunction of very different uses accounts for the lasting seduction of the formula.
ideas; liberalism; tradition; Concealment; Latin America