The Limits of Presidential Impeachment: Lessons from Latin America

Abstract

This chapter revisits presidential impeachments in Latin America, an important in-between-election accountability mechanism against presidential misconduct. Since the third wave of democratisation, and especially in the last ten years, congressional pressure and/or legislative votes have become the prevalent way to force a president prematurely out of office. However, the use of impeachment in practice has made apparent the limits of this tool. This chapter assesses such errors and makes a theoretical contribution to the literature in elaborating on them. We name them Type 1 and Type 2 errors, respectively: the first marking an impeachment process that leads to the removal of a president on tenuous grounds, whereas the latter refers to the failure to impeach a president despite their apparent unlawful or undemocratic behaviour. We illustrate these errors with the cases of Peru since 2018 and Brazil since 2019, arguably extreme instances of Types 1 and 2, respectively. Yet, we also show that the solutions that have been presented as alternatives to impeachment may have their own shortcomings, too.