 Early Latin American liberalism must be seen through the influence of the Spanish liberalism that developed in this political context, although the former’s two strands developed in different directions. While the Hispanic American strand (i.e., the strand in Spanish-speaking America) was firmly committed to a radical break with the colonial past, the Brazilian one was marked by crucial points of continuity. Let us consider the Hispanic strand first. The mark of the Cádiz constitution was evident in most Hispanic American constitutions in the first half of the century (Safford 1987: 62). All of them claimed sovereign authority to lie in the people or the nation and protected some basic individual rights (such as freedom of thought and of the press) that were considered natural. They all maintained protection of the Catholic religion as the official one as well as most of the corporate privileges of the Catholic Church. They also established a separation of powers and departed from the Spanish model by creating bicameral systems. However, there are at least two important points of contrast between Spanish and Hispanic American liberals. The first one is that Hispanic American liberals could not buttress their constitutionalism with appeals to historical legitimacy. They could not present the constitutions that they produced in continuity with the fundamental medieval laws of the Spanish monarchy. Independence from Spain pushed, after three centuries of colonialism, to conceive of the liberal institutions as something completely new that lacked any historical precedent. By contrast with Spanish liberals who looked both to the future and to the past, the Hispanic American ones made a break with the past and looked to the future only where emancipation and progress were supposed to lie. Liberal constitutions held the promise of a society fully transformed away from the colonial structures and in accordance with the protection of individual freedoms and legal equality. When Hispanic American liberalism became the ideology of a political group in the mid-century, its identity was importantly centered in this forward looking attitude. Liberal political actors often referred to themselves as “the party of progress.”