The objective of this article is to contextualize and specify the possibility of democratic operation in Latin America. This study seeks to respond to the performance currently asked of democracy in a modem society, expressed in demands for quality, where it can be observed that its materialization seems more probable or improbable depending on how the type of society that contains it is defined and understood, on the contextual niches in which it develops and real examples in Latin American countries. Niklas Luhmann's theoretical and methodological proposal for modern social systems is used; the analysis is illustrated with Latin America examples. The conclusions remit us to the limitations with which democracy is confronted and its requirements of quality in Latin America, whose deficits can be explained by a social operation that tends toward high degrees of informality, exclusion, stabilization of client networks, corruption; all attributes with which normative orientation of a modern social order must confront and the actions belonging to a part of the world that tends toward stratified and hierarchical dynamics.