As part of this year’s LASA Congress, held in Paris from 26 to 30 May, we organized and participated in several panels. Below, you will find the panel titles and abstracts, together with details of the speakers.

Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Expression in the Latin American Constitutional Regimes of the 19th Century

 The freedom of the press and the freedom of expression were pillars of the new constitutional regimes that took shape in Latin America after the declarations of independence of the 1810s and 1820s in both Spanish America and Brazil. Until that period, the censorship system of the Iberian colonial world operated through the working of the Church and the Inquisition. As a result of the revolutions of independence, however, the emerging nation-states needed to establish their own legal mechanisms to regulate the freedom of expression. In that context, as the historian Fausta Gantús has observed, the press fulfilled a paradoxical role: as guarantor of essential political freedom and, at the same time, as frequent source of instability and conflict.

Inspired by the Atlantic revolutions and by the 1812 Cádiz constitution, the Latin American charters sought to protect free thought while making up a dense and new juridical corpus that aimed to control public expression and, above all, the printed word. In this way, in a period in which periodicals, pamphlets and leaflets became central to the incipient public sphere, the freedom of the press established itself as an arena for disputes about the limits of political liberalism.

This workshop brought together a group of researchers working on several Latin American countries – from Mexico and Brasil to Argentina and the Andean world – to discuss how the 19th-century constitutional regimes negotiated the tensions between the republican ideal of universal rights and the restrictive norms that limited political practices in the name of preserving social order. Our objective, then, was to generate a conversation around the problem of the freedom of the press and expression in post-independence Latin America, showing both its emancipatory potential and structural contradictions.

Organisers: Juan Neves Sarriegui (Ramon Llull University), Rodrigo Camargo de Godoi (Unicamp)

Chair: Corinna Zeltsman (University of Princeton)

Speakers: Juan Neves Sarriegui, Rodrigo Camargo de Godoi, Laura Cucchi (University of Buenos Aires), Felipe Cifuentes (Javeriana University of Bogotá)

Origins and Development of Parliamentary Culture in Latin America since the Wars of Independence

At LASA 2026 we organized a double panel on the origins and development of parliamentary culture in Latin America, covering the period from the wars of independence to the early twentieth century. The topic remains understudied relative to the attention historians have given to executives and armies in the making of these new republics.

The first session addressed the conceptual and historiographical groundwork for this kind of research, beginning with the distinction between constituent congresses and ordinary legislatures. The panel then turned to how parliamentary institutions took hold across different national settings, tracing considerable variation from one country to the next.

The second session was organized around three lines of research: the relationship between executives and legislatures, the internal workings of legislative chambers -debates, procedures, the routine business of governing- and the links between parliament, civil society, and "public opinion".

These panels extend a collaboration that has been underway since 2014, when our research network began meeting regularly at LASA congresses. LASA 2026 represents another stage in that ongoing work, part of a broader effort to produce a fuller history of Latin American parliaments that considers not only institutions and procedure, but also the politics, social composition, culture, and material and gendered dimensions of these bodies.

Speakers included: Jorge Luengo (Pompeu Fabra University), Laura Cucchi (Universidad de Buenos Aires), Victor Uribe (Florida International University), André Jockyman Roithmann (Queen Mary University of London), Israel Arroyo (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP)), Andréa Slemian (Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP)), Veronique Hebrand (Universidad de Lille), Martín O. Castro (CONICET–Instituto E. Ravignani / UNTREF), Ana Leonor Romero (Universidad de Buenos Aires / Ravignani)