Judicial Management in Latin American Criminal Procedure Reforms: Stages, Tensions, and Unresolved Disputes

Abstract

Judicial management was one of the most frequently invoked concepts in Latin American criminal procedure reforms over the past three decades, yet its meaning remains contested. In this article, we ask how judicial management was understood in the different stages of criminal justice reform; we seek to identify the orientations currently in dispute, and we analyze them in light of their contribution to the goal of a democratic criminal justice system. To this end, we reconstruct the historical trajectory of judicial management from 1994 - the starting point of a wave of reform that extended throughout the region- to the present. The central argument is that this trajectory is not accidental: it reflects unresolved structural tensions between the inquisitorial model that the reforms sought to abandon and the democratic adversarial model they aimed to build. Through a historical-political analysis drawing on specialized literature and empirical regional monitoring reports, the article identifies three stages: an initial stage marked by indifference toward management; a second in which management emerged as a central problem and gave rise to new organizational designs; and a current stage in which two orientations coexist in tension —modernizing/managerialist and political/structural — with distinct premises and objectives. The article also proposes an organizational conceptual framework to critically examine this dispute and assess its practical implications.