Despite the intuitive theoretical relationship suggested by the standard (Meltzer & Richard, 1981) model, the empirical results of the vast literature studying the effects of democracy on redistribution and inequality are many times ambiguous and don’t point towards a clear consensus. Acemoglu et al. (2015) developed a unified framework to capture the more nuanced relationship between these variables, and to incorporate some of the theoretical mechanisms proposed by the literature to explain its ambiguous results. This paper follows this framework, first validating its results on a reduced sample (Latin American countries) and extended data; and then expands on it by first considering a broader conception of inequality —based on Sen’s (1999) capabilities approach— and then by exploring the role that “elite-captured” political systems —operationalized following Albertus & Menaldo (2018)— may play in explaining the sometimes-contradictory empirical relationship between democracy and inequality. The results from this exploratory quantitative analysis provide support to the hypotheses of both extensions being potentially relevant for a complete analysis of democracy and inequality in the Latin American region, and the most robust findings suggest that elite-power in Latin America mitigates the inequality-decreasing effects of democratization.