As a region, Latin America has been a proving ground for the scholarly understanding of human rights change at various levels of analysis, including the transnational level. Contributors to this edited volume address the domestic, regional, and global politics of how democratized states reckon with a recent historical legacy of human rights violations, as well as new problems. The subtitle of Sustaining Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century: Strategies from Latin America is something of a misnomer. It is not a collection of strategies at all, but a compilation of original essays from a set of scholars engaging with the human rights issues that Latin American countries have grappled with for decades. As such, it makes an important contribution to the literature on human rights and Latin American politics that will be useful for anyone who follows political and theoretical developments in this area. It could also serve as an introduction to these topics for advanced students of Latin American politics. And, it poses important questions for further research as the political landscape of human rights changes in this region.
The volume illuminates complexities of human rights recognition in new democracies as well as Latin America’s place in a global political context. Commissioned following a 2009 conference at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington DC, the book is divided into three sections. The first, “The Human Rights Idea,” is something of a refresher course on the development of human rights in tandem with the Latin American political context. Here the editors, Mark Unger and Katherine Hite, helpfully outline the historical, political, and conceptual “Arc of Human Rights” in the region since periods of military rule in the 1960s. The second section, ”Institutional and Legal Frameworks and the Question of Accountability,” attempts to address impunity as well as threats to human rights that persist in democratic states. In some cases, current problems are fueled by shortcomings in how state and local institutions are responding to ordinary crime, as Ungar’s singly authored essay suggests. The third section, “Citizens’ Movements and Conceptions of Citizenship,” features chapters detailing how civil society has shaped and will continue to shape responses to human rights violations in Latin America. It is worth mentioning that, although the conference was held in 2009, the chapters themselves incorporate later developments.
Ungar and Hite’s introductory chapter starts by summarizing the region’s recent human rights history as well as the importance of antiauthoritarian political movements within Latin American countries in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Now countries like Chile, Argentina, Peru, and others face the accountability question as human rights principles have been translated into legal protections. Newer rights conceptions and capacity challenges are mentioned, too. For example, incorporation of new rights is detailed in Henry Carey’s chapter on how NGOs seek to address issues on the frontier of the provision of economic, social and cultural rights. Not surprisingly, the political and legal changes that have occurred dictate that despite the content of law, the substantive provision of rights is still problematic. The need for further progress on the next steps – in essence, applying the law and legal norms related to human rights – is the launching point for many of the essays that follow in this volume.
The very best pieces are those that most pointedly elaborate either explicitly or implicitly on Ungar and Hite’s juxtaposition of law with substantive outcomes, by offering empirical perspectives on developments related to the consolidation of rights and the development of rights-protective civil societies in Latin America. For the sake of space, I briefly highlight three chapters in particular: those by Jo-Marie Burt on human rights prosecutions; by Priscilla Hayner on truth commissions; and by Katherine Hite on political memory in Chile.
Jo-Marie Burt reviews the course of human rights prosecutions through a four-case comparison of events in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Peru. She argues that although a globalizing justice dynamic may be suggested by the increasing number of human rights prosecutions (as suggested elsewhere by Ellen Lutz and Kathryn Sikkink’s term “justice cascade”), the cross-national variation in accountability processes calls for a more fine-grained understanding of how human rights violators are treated after countries return to democracy. Burt notes that trials are often selective and do not target all known violators, leaving society (particularly the persons directly affected by the violations in question) with the justifiable perception that the level of accountability has been incomplete. In support of her argument, she contrasts the legitimacy of Argentina’s prompt trials with Uruguay’s drawn out process, and contestation in Peru by loyalists of the Fujimori regime.
The peace versus justice debate is a familiar conundrum for societies in transition after periods of repression, but Hayner brings fresh scholarly precision as well as a regional comparison to the discussion in her chapter. She compares the pursuit of justice in Africa (where debate is currently intense about the role of the International Criminal Court), with Latin America (where countries for the most part have applied national measures). Hayner focuses on Latin American cases where the pursuit of justice has occurred in the aftermath of some sort of negotiated peace accords: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia. By comparison, the International Criminal Court and global actors have been much more involved in Sudan, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Liberia. She notes that whereas civil society actors were key participants in Burt’s cases, the formal peace agreements in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia (thus far) seem to have made it more difficult to pursue criminal justice routes for accountability, particularly given those countries’ weakened civil societies and domestic institutions. The peace agreements also came with at least partial amnesty provisions. Despite the difficulty of comparing Latin America and Africa on the human-rights-justice axis, she offers four causal factors that impact levels of accountability: the strength of the regional human rights framework, strength of civil society, presence or absence of ongoing conflict, and arrests of leaders after agreements. This is an ambitious chapter, and thorough lessons from the cases are precluded by its brevity, but she tantalizingly suggests, “to find out if Latin America represent[s] the future … watch Africa” (p. 161). Indeed, a global thread is present throughout the volume, including Gordon Hanson’s chapter on migration and Monique Segarra’s on development, human rights, and the environment.
Hite’s singly-authored chapter explores another issue of importance as Latin America’s most repressive periods recede: memory and memorialization of the victims. Here she surveys the ways that these periods have been represented in museums and memorials. She highlights, as do many of the other chapters, the importance of human rights organizations and activists in not only remembering, but “educating.”
The volume was compiled to honor Prof. Margaret Crahan, now a senior research scholar at Columbia University. A sense of humor and scholarly staying power shines through in her brief but substantive epilogue, where she jokes about having worked on human rights “since the Middle Ages (i.e., the 1950s).” The scholars here have done her proud. Conference compendia can be either very specialized or not well integrated, or both. But this volume presents a high-quality, fascinating snapshot of the wide range of Latin American rights-related governance issues from global, regional, and national perspectives.
