Throughout Latin America, this question has almost never been asked, because even if it has not often been applied, democracy is still an indisputable value which, like love, hardly needs any explanation. But if the question is asked, it is often answered in an almost mechanical way, with a formulation that is closer to a conjuration than to an explanation: democracy is "the government of the people, by the people and for the people "1 . 1 This is the last sentence of the Gettysburg Address, delivered by Abraham Lincoln at the dedication ceremony of the battlefield that claimed 51,000 lives among Union and Confederate soldiers between 1 and 3 July 1863 during the North American Civil War. Such is the popularity of this phrase, which in 1958 was included in the last paragraph of Article 2 of the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic...