El surgimiento del guardián administrativo: La contraloría general de la república entre 1927 y 1943

This article examines the establishment of the Comptroller-General Office in 1927, and the first years of its operation. It is argued that the origin of the Comptroller-General Office is better understood in the context of the concentration of power in the executive branch and the embryonic development of a modern public bureaucracy after the enactment of the 1925 Constitution. At the outset the Comptroller-General Office was a crucial instrument for the modernization of the public bureaucracy. In this period the institution gradually was developing its own bureaucratic culture and its current institutional features were taking form. This paper examines how, through a series of reforms, the Comptroller-General Office was granted with a degree of independence, and how its legality review and its interpretative powers acquired its current features. The period under examination ends in 1943 when a constitutional reform entrenched the Comptroller-General in the Constitution and triggered a critical transformative process for the office.