The essay explores, from a socio-historical approach, the social perspectives that exist within Latin American student movements. The article is based on an exhaustive research of four of the principal movements of the last hundred years taking place in Argentina (1918), Brazil (1968), Mexico (1968), and Chile (2011). The interpretation developed in the essay starts from the assumption that these movements can be understood as a social phenomenon. It ends with the affirma-tion that are, and remain for now, eminently liberal movements.