Tag: Latin America

Summer Reflections Series: Sustainable Settlements for Peace

As Berta Cáceres Fellow, Ricardo Velasco documented the development of Sustainable Settlements for Peace, a program developed by the organization CASA (Council for Sustainable Settlements of Latin America) and the Foundation Mentes en Transicion in Isla Grande, Islas del Rosario and in Filandia, Department of Quindío, Colombia. Through action-based and transformative education projects, and in dialogue with local knowledges, Sustainable Settlements for Peace aims to accompany and support historically marginalized communities in their achievment of their goals of autonomy and sustainable development, and to contribute to the construction of peace in rural Colombia by recovering local traditional knowledges and sharing practical skills for sustainability and peaceful coexistence. In Isla Grande, the program has been implemented in collaboration with the Local Council of Black Communities  through different pedagogical and community engagement processes that include agroecology and conflict resolutions workshops, as well as organizational efforts for improving the eco-tourism economy developed by local families. This local economy has been intrinsically linked with ongoing struggles for territorial autonomy in a context of state neglect. In Filandia the program has partenered with the Peasant Organization ANUC to accompany local coffee producers as they make an holistic transition into organic productive models that consider the social and cultural aspects of sustainability. The program also supports organizational efforts that have been disrupted within a context of stigmatization against local social leaders.

Ricardo’s research documents the differential impact Sustainable Settlements for Peace is having within the communities and how the program mobilizes the potential of local human and natural resources, and the opportunities opened by the transitional justice conjuncture. He explores the potential of the initiative for revitalizing community ties and producing new articulations of social and human rights mobilizations among ethnic minorities and marginalized groups to promote inclusion, social and environmental justice. At the same time, his work also includes teaching basic documentation techniques to youth leaders within these communities so that they can share and learn from their own experiences, recover local traditional knowledges, and have better communication strategies by leveraging the potential of new media.

Ricardo Velasco is a Berta Cáceres Human Rights Fellow (2018), a Summer Human Rights Fellows (2017 & 2018), and a Summer Fieldwork Grantee (2016)

The Need To Increase Participatory Mechanisms at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

by Karina G. Carpintero

27 MAR 2017

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has been subject to significant criticism regarding the absence of participatory mechanisms that allow societal actors to intervene in the inter-American process.  To some extent, these critiques reflect a similar demand that is occurring in the domestic realm.  Latin-American constitutional democracies present a scenario in which social movements, among many different types of other relevant stakeholders, aim to move forward toward more participatory schemes. Societies are beginning to challenge governments and institutions with demands for more transparency, accountability, and concrete deliberative mechanisms.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has just one available method for outside actors to participate in its international process: amicus curiae briefs. The process entails submitting a written brief before the hearing of an individual case or advisory opinion takes place. Unfortunately, the impact these briefs have is almost null. There is not necessarily any consideration of what the amicus argues, which can be understood as the ‘claim of society’ in an individual case. Because this is the only road to make societal voices heard, there is clear difficulty in accessing “inter-American justice.”

However, realizing how narrow access to this international process is, and debating about it, does introduce an opportunity to start thinking about ways to improve it. The Court should reconsider its procedures in order to enact fruitful strategies that lead to more active participatory methodologies. In fact, there are some alternatives that the Court could take as steps towards that aim. One effective reform could be using a virtual platform, like the internet, as an accessible tool that aids in shortening distances and reducing the economic costs of international actions. Another pathway for reform could be holding an open call for hearings, not only for the parties of individual cases as it does in its ordinary period of sessions, but also to individuals, advocates or organizations that participate in amicus briefs. A bolder method of reform could be considering formal changes to the Court’s rules of procedures to encourage more democratic practices.  Without doubt, engaging in effectively increasing the level of participation at the international order is a difficult challenge to implement, but it is clear that amicus curiae briefs are insufficient as the sole available tool.

All in all, if the Inter-American Court assumes the role of informing the regional consensus about how human rights should be interpreted, protected and guaranteed, more clarity on how these consensuses are reached should be guaranteed. So, the next step for the Inter-American Court, and human rights advocates generally, is to search for more participatory mechanisms to legitimize the creation of conventional meaning.

Karina G. Carpintero is an LLM student at Texas Law, concentrating in Human Rights and Comparative Constitutional Law, and member of the 2016-2017 Working Paper Series Editorial Committee.

New Research on the Relationships between Businesses and Military Regimes under Latin America’s Cold War

by Eyal Weinberg

13 FEB 2017

State terror and human rights violations during Latin America’s authoritarian phase have been amply studied in the past two decades. Scholarship has revealed how Cold War military dictatorships and juntas-headed national security states detained, tortured, and disappeared hundreds of thousands of civilians— from indigenous groups in Central America to political activists in the Southern Cone. Studies have also illuminated how the relations of military regimes with various international and domestic forces—among them U.S. policymakers, Church representatives, technocratic experts, and industrialists—enabled and facilitated that repression. Yet many facets of the repressive apparatus remain under-examined.

Recently, scholars are returning to scrutinize the interplay between business corporations and Latin American regimes. Early literature has already unraveled the close ties between business elites and authoritarian rules, from the state’s reliance on industrialists in developing a pro-market, open economy, to industrialists’ consent and sometimes-active support of coups d’état and ensuing state-led repression.  Today, newly available archives and updated approaches to the study of Latin America’s Cold War allow researchers to revisit some of these issues, as well as other questions that explore the entanglements between corporations and regimes.

Studies exemplifying this new wave of research were presented last September in a special workshop at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Presentations shed light on the changing nature of relationships between businesses and dictatorships across states and over time, analyzing the transitions from collaborations to conflicts and even opposition. They also examined the direct and indirect roles companies played in state-sponsored repression.  And they explicated how the regimes’ policy planning met business interests to introduce new domestic industries—healthcare, energy, and pharmaceutical markets, to name a few. The histories of multinational corporations under the military rules received a particular focus. Moving beyond the traditional interpretation of the authoritarian state as a guarantor of international companies, papers focused on how subsidiaries dealt with both state apparatuses and parent corporations, typically located in Europe or North America.

In Argentina, for example, German companies Deutz, Siemens, and Daimler-Benz held subsidiaries operating during the Dirty War. Case studies examined how these businesses reacted to workers’ protests and union demands, as well as how they handled reports of disappeared people in their correspondence with the distant board of directors. In 2015, for example, a team of Argentinian researchers supported by Argentina’s Ministry of Justice published a detailed report that investigates the responsibility of domestic and multinational companies in regard to human rights violations carried out on the premises of their factories. The workshop’s papers also payed considerable attention to the relationship of Volkswagen do Brasil (a subsidiary of the German car manufacturer) with the Brazilian regime and its counterinsurgency agencies. The Brazilian National Truth Commission (2012-2014) concluded that over 70 corporations, among them Volkswagen, provided security agencies with blacklists of unionizing and “problematic” workers, some of whom were later detained or fired. The workshop’s presentations illustrated the controversy over the extent of VW’s collaboration with state repression, a result of inaccessible or missing archival material. For now, appeals are still in review at the office of the Attorney General.

As the last example demonstrates, there is much to reveal about the intricate relationships between corporations and authoritarian regimes in Latin America, and particularly about their relation to human rights violations. Further archival research, as well as intellectual exchanges focused on that theme, will expand current knowledge and scholarship.

Eyal Weinberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin and member of the 2016-2017 Working Paper Series Editorial Committee.

The Human Right to Education and Economic Inequality

by Samantha Chammings

19 NOV 2015

Craig Lauchner’s working paper was written as part of the Fall 2015 law school class and Rapoport Center Colloquium on Inequality and Human Rights. The Colloquium brought together scholars, academics, practitioners, and students from the UT Law School and LBJ School of Public Policy to ask the question: can human rights do anything to alleviate economic inequality?

The answer to this question was often a resounding “no”: human rights law does not have the tools to close the wealth gap between rich and poor. Indeed, the “age of human rights” has coincided with the entrenchment of neoliberalism, to paraphrase Samuel Moyn. Lauchner’s paper also comes to this conclusion, through an in-depth study focusing on one particular human right—access to education—in one particular region of the world: the Mercosur Region (which includes Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela). In fact, his paper concludes that not only have human rights policies failed to alleviate economic inequality in the region, but they have also, in some instances, perpetuated those very inequalities. Lauchner provides a compelling account of the ways in which human rights policies can actually entrench existing power, and by extension economic, inequalities.

In particular, Lauchner describes a policy developed in 1998 by the Sector Educativo de Mercosur (SEM) to ensure that university degrees obtained in a SEM country are recognizable in every country in the region. While this aimed at decreasing inequality between countries, in actuality it had the unintended consequence of forcing smaller countries with less well-established university institutions to invest money into subsidizing university attendance by wealthier segments of society. Focusing policies on tertiary-level education, Lauchner argues, rather than on primary and secondary education, has disproportionately benefited elites and perpetuated existing inequalities in society. While many governments are spending the same on university-level education as on primary and secondary-level education, the preexisting privileges of those individuals able to attend university means that human rights policies, which by definition are applied indiscriminately, result in a fundamentally unjust outcome.

For Lauchner, the SEM case is an example of how human rights policies are blind to inequality. They seek to raise everybody above a certain minimal threshold, but, as Moyn concluded, place no limits or ceiling on wealth. Lauchner gets to the crux of this when he notes that in Latin America, the right to education is enforceable by the courts, but this does not signify a right to equal education. And by definition, those who are poor are less able to enforce those very same rights. However, Moyn argues that it is by virtue of a small elite amassing unrestrained wealth that other people are forced to go hungry. Human rights policies, if not a part of this system, at the very least sit idly by and allow economic inequality to exist and even increase.

In Lauchner’s account of the right to education in Latin America, human rights policies do at least have the capability to decrease inequality and do provide some benefits to the poor. However, he argues that the specific policies have also resulted in furthering inequality. Unlike Moyn, he does not conclude that human rights are fundamentally incompatible with efforts to decrease inequality, but rather, they simply may not be the best tool to do so, at least in relation to access to education within Latin America.

Samantha Chammings is an LL.M. Human Rights and Comparative Constitutional Law graduate from the University of Texas School of Law. She was a Rapoport Center Scholar in Spring 2016.