As noted above, the field of transitional justice originates in deliberations over how the new democracies of the mid and late 1980s in Latin America ought to respond to gross human rights violations committed under the prior military dictatorships. The starting point of these discussions was that as much justice as possible should be achieved without endangering the democratic transition - or even better, that justice should contribute to the consolidation of a liberal democratic order (Albon 1995). These premises for the new field of transitional justice were in part the consequence of the conditions of its origin, namely as a merger between the normative frameworks of human rights and the transition to democracy discourses, influenced by scholars such as Huntington, Linz and Stepan (Huntington 1991; Linz and Stepan 1996). To put it simply, the field of transitional justice made the question of justice central to democratic transitions, but also made the question of political transformation central to the agenda of justice.