Manuel García-Pelayo, professor of Constitutional Law and former president of the Constitutional Court in Spain. Royal Academy of History
On the 31st anniversary of the death of Manuel García-Pelayo, it is possible that someone may see in this remembrance of his superb professorial figure one more gesture of the hypocritical obituary memory with which we Spaniards frequently try to repair the heroes whom we unfairly mistreated in lifetime.
However, the appearance of a very important text —until now absolutely unpublished— due to his pen, where with accurate premonition he warns the drafters of the 1978 Constitution of its potential defects, paints the propitious occasion to remember the phenomenal relevance of the thought of a clairvoyant teacher who with the weapons of the intellect defended freedom in both hemispheres —to put it in the lyrical prose of the Cadiz constituent—.
And it is that, indeed, Don Manuel was not only a key jurist in the forging of freedom in the Spain of the long stony night of the dictatorship.
A professor who perfectly handled constitutional techniques, as is fully confirmed by reading the delicious unpublished pages that now come to light in a careful edition (
Unpublished Report on the Constitution,
2021), if not he was also an essential teacher in American continent.
Leaving aside his early arrival in Argentina and his first stay at the University of Río Piedras in Puerto Rico, Don Manuel found a definitive seat in Venezuela, which in 1957 began democratic life.
From the Institute of Political Studies, which he created and directed, he made an effort to train hundreds of intellectuals and to supply democratic ideas at a time when the prestige and favorable presumption that always accompanies the new, fell on the side of the leaden Marxist ideologies. and guerrillas from revolutionary Cuba.
Faced with the simplifications of Marta Harnecker and her emulators, Don Manuel offered a fundamental constitutional theoretical arsenal to establish freedom in America.
To illustrate, a fact.
García-Pelayo introduced the concept of Social and Democratic State of Law in America:
he built it in Mexico at a memorable seminar at UNAM in the early 1970s.
And from there and he spread throughout the continent, reaching with all force the paradigmatic Colombian Constitution of 1991 and even Brazil.
But it is not about making history, because García-Pelayo's legacy continues to be an essential reference for Hispanic America in a problematic present in which the conceptual language of politics borders on the absurd when it does not fall into the chaotic and opens the way to demagoguery of words
Because we live in times of crisis, times of questioning democratic values, of constituent processes.
Times in which we lack new solutions for the old problems of inequality, injustice and misery and violence.
And since we don't have anything new to read, it would be good if we made an effort to reread the pages that old and great masters, such as Don Manuel García-Pelayo, wrote for both hemispheres and that in Spain is called revising the Constitution, and in America, now that the social pact is remade, defend freedom from the Social and Democratic State of Law.
Josu de Miguel
is a professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Cantabria.
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