Part II The Domestic Element, 13 Inter-Americanization: Its Legal Bases and Political Impact

The reconfiguration of the relationship between international and national law has played an important role in shaping transformative constitutionalism in Latin America. This chapter introduces a new concept—inter-Americanization—to explain that transformation. The inter-Americanization of national legal orders describes the gradual adoption of inter-American standards by states that have recognized the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and their incorporation into national public law. We reconstruct the national and inter-American norms as well as the legal discourses that drive this process forward. Moreover, we exemplify the process of inter-Americanization with salient decisions of IACtHR, with a special focus on guarantees of nonrepetition. Our main argument is that such a process was enabled by a regulated open state, which allowed other legal orders to penetrate into national constitutions. We conclude by emphasizing that inter-Americanization has contributed to finding answers to the structural challenges of the Latin American region.