(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Fondo Editorial, 2006) Pérez Herrero, Pedro
The essay explains why and how Latin American societies, during the period of1930 to 1980, accepted the different variants of populist regimes; why these political systems perpetuated for such a long time; what mechanisms were employed to manage internal order; why and how the destruction occurred in the decade of the 1980s; why at the beginning of the 21st century certain forms of populist-demagogicappeals in the Latin-American political panorama returned to the scene; why the State in Latin America reached such low levels of institutionalism halfway through the 20th century; why the discourse of mixed races transformed itself into the central element, capable of uniting the complex magma formed by structural heterogeneity; and why «old nationalisms» are giving way to new methods and alternative discourses about the concept of identity at the beginning of the 21st century.