ABSTRACT
Despite the long tradition of constitutionalism and legality in Latin America, the new democracies of the 1990s still show widespread areas of undue process of law. The judicial anomalies affect mainly the underprivileged and the poor, but it is also quite common to find biased trials in politically relevant cases, no matter the socio economic stratum of the individuals affected, while corruption practices and political networks provide some sort of legal privileges for the benefit of the rich and the influential. These faults in the judicial system are grave enough to qualify as a situation of incompleteness of the rule of law, an undemocratic feature that prevents the will of the people from prevailing in practice in most new democracies of the region.
