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Abstract

This article examines — in the light of studies, analyses and essays
upon the recent Argentinian and Brazilian political processes — the dominant literature on the interpretation of the Latin American political regimes. It postulates the existence of several interpretative currents wich accompany a route where both countries suffer three great inflections: the restablishment of the democratic political regime; the deep transformation of the adopted economical organizacional model of the present analytic current and think over a possible configuration of a new interpretative current. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first, which is published in this issue, it discusses the traces of politics and democratic institutions in Brazil and Argentina. In the second part (to be published in the next issue), we analyse the performance of these institutions with regard to the economic and state
changes and come to some general conclusions.