 Despite their lofty ambitions, the struggles of political actors to transform Latin American societies in light of liberal ideas and values have almost unanimously been met with a harsh judgement. Since early on in the nineteenth century, there emerged the concern that liberal ideas were “imported” and inadequate for Latin American societies (Bolívar 1815). Later, in the early twentieth, the discourse that liberalism had been a failure in the region enjoyed ample support given the oligarchical nature of the liberal regimes, the establishment of authoritarian “liberal” governments, and the inability of the liberal establishments to properly channel social demands for political participation and the inclusion of the large impoverished majorities in the benefits of economic growth. Since then, scholars have debated on the alleged inadequacy of Latin American societies for liberal institutions, the ways in which the “adaptation” of liberalism in Latin American allegedly “deviated” from the “original” European and North American liberal “models”, and the “foreign” nature of the latter.