 After having been the triumphant ideology of nation building in most of Latin America in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, liberalism entered a phase of decline. In most of the region the liberal political and economic order was made unstable by social movements that contested the oligarchical nature of the regimes and pressed for both democratization and the inclusion of the masses in the benefits of economic growth. For reasons having to do with each particular national context, critics objected that the sought after transformation of Latin American societies in light of liberal ideas and values had been a failure. Where the liberal order had led to authoritarian regimes, as in Venezuela and Mexico, critics maintained that liberalism had proved inadequate for these societies. In Mexico, this skepticism emerged from within the liberal establishment itself (Rabasa 1912). In Venezuela, the positivist sociologist Laureano Vallenilla famously argued that authoritarian forms of governance were more suitable for Hispanic American societies (Vallenilla 1919). In Chile, the liberal parliamentarian regime that had successfully limited executive power in the 1870’s and 80’s was gradually eroded and finally displaced by a new presidentialism in the 1920’s. Chilean liberal parliamentarism proved unable to manage social unrest and criticism (Correa Sutil 2004 &amp; 2008). There began a new conservative narrative that glorified the authoritarian regimes of the 1830’s and served to legitimize authoritarian rule (Edwards 1928). In Argentina, the liberal oligarchical regime was displaced in elections in which universal male suffrage was mandatory for the first time. The Brazilian republic, which had been established through a military coup, was in turn overthrown by another military coup and replaced with a dictatorship in the 1930s. By midcentury, corporativisms of various sorts as well as socialist, Marxist, indigenous, agrarian, and populist political movements and ideologies had become dominant and displaced liberalism in the region.