Challenges of Human Rights in Latin America

Challenges of Human Rights in Latin America PDF Author: César Landa
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527521036
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Latin America offers a democratic and constitutional process, with the goals to respect fundamental human rights and control the excess of power. Nevertheless, the weaknesses of the rule of law’s institutions does not guarantee for all citizens the protection of old and new rights. In this sense, the Inter-American Fundamental Rights Conference organized by the Inter-American Network on Fundamental Rights and Democracy (RED–IDD) is an annual meeting of professors and researchers from the different universities of Latin America, addressing topics of particular importance regarding the possibilities and challenges of the consolidation of the constitutional state in the region. This book presents the minutes of the Fourth Inter-American Fundamental Rights Conference, and explores topics such as political rights and the consolidation of democracy in Latin America; impeachment and judicial guarantees; the challenges of freedom of information: and judicial protection and due process, amongst others.

Challenges of Human Rights in Latin America

Challenges of Human Rights in Latin America PDF Author: César Landa
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527521036
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Get Book Here

Book Description
Latin America offers a democratic and constitutional process, with the goals to respect fundamental human rights and control the excess of power. Nevertheless, the weaknesses of the rule of law’s institutions does not guarantee for all citizens the protection of old and new rights. In this sense, the Inter-American Fundamental Rights Conference organized by the Inter-American Network on Fundamental Rights and Democracy (RED–IDD) is an annual meeting of professors and researchers from the different universities of Latin America, addressing topics of particular importance regarding the possibilities and challenges of the consolidation of the constitutional state in the region. This book presents the minutes of the Fourth Inter-American Fundamental Rights Conference, and explores topics such as political rights and the consolidation of democracy in Latin America; impeachment and judicial guarantees; the challenges of freedom of information: and judicial protection and due process, amongst others.

Barrio Democracy in Latin America

Barrio Democracy in Latin America PDF Author: Eduardo Canel
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271037334
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The transition to democracy underway in Latin America since the 1980s has recently witnessed a resurgence of interest in experimenting with new forms of local governance emphasizing more participation by ordinary citizens. The hope is both to foster the spread of democracy and to improve equity in the distribution of resources. While participatory budgeting has been a favorite topic of many scholars studying this new phenomenon, there are many other types of ongoing experiments. In Barrio Democracy in Latin America, Eduardo Canel focuses our attention on the innovative participatory programs launched by the leftist government in Montevideo, Uruguay, in the early 1990s. Based on his extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Canel examines how local activists in three low-income neighborhoods in that city dealt with the opportunities and challenges of implementing democratic practices and building better relationships with sympathetic city officials.

Violent Democracies in Latin America

Violent Democracies in Latin America PDF Author: Enrique Desmond Arias
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392038
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Despite recent political movements to establish democratic rule in Latin American countries, much of the region still suffers from pervasive violence. From vigilantism, to human rights violations, to police corruption, violence persists. It is perpetrated by state-sanctioned armies, guerillas, gangs, drug traffickers, and local community groups seeking self-protection. The everyday presence of violence contrasts starkly with governmental efforts to extend civil, political, and legal rights to all citizens, and it is invoked as evidence of the failure of Latin American countries to achieve true democracy. The contributors to this collection take the more nuanced view that violence is not a social aberration or the result of institutional failure; instead, it is intimately linked to the institutions and policies of economic liberalization and democratization. The contributors—anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians—explore how individuals and institutions in Latin American democracies, from the rural regions of Colombia and the Dominican Republic to the urban centers of Brazil and Mexico, use violence to impose and contest notions of order, rights, citizenship, and justice. They describe the lived realities of citizens and reveal the historical foundations of the violence that Latin America suffers today. One contributor examines the tightly woven relationship between violent individuals and state officials in Colombia, while another contextualizes violence in Rio de Janeiro within the transnational political economy of drug trafficking. By advancing the discussion of democratic Latin American regimes beyond the usual binary of success and failure, this collection suggests more sophisticated ways of understanding the challenges posed by violence, and of developing new frameworks for guaranteeing human rights in Latin America. Contributors: Enrique Desmond Arias, Javier Auyero, Lilian Bobea, Diane E. Davis, Robert Gay, Daniel M. Goldstein, Mary Roldán, Todd Landman, Ruth Stanley, María Clemencia Ramírez

Human Rights in Latin America

Human Rights in Latin America PDF Author: Sonia Cardenas
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081220154X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
For the last half century, Latin America has been plagued by civil wars, dictatorships, torture, legacies of colonialism and racism, and other evils. The region has also experienced dramatic—if uneven—human rights improvements. The accounts of how Latin America's people have dealt with the persistent threats to their fundamental rights offer lessons for people around the world. Human Rights in Latin America: A Politics of Terror and Hope is the first textbook to provide a comprehensive introduction to the human rights issues facing an area that constitutes more than half of the Western Hemisphere. Leading human rights researcher and educator Sonia Cardenas brings together regional examples of both terror and hope, emphasizing the dualities inherent in human rights struggles. Organized by three pivotal topics—human rights violations, reform, and accountability—this book offers an authoritative synthesis of research on human rights on the continent. From historical accounts of abuse to successful transnational campaigns and legal battles, Human Rights in Latin America explores the tensions underlying a vast range of human rights initiatives. In addition to surveying the roles of the United States, relatives of the disappeared, and truth commissions, Cardenas covers newer ground in addressing the colonial and ideological underpinnings of human rights abuses, emerging campaigns for disability and sexuality rights, and regional dynamics relating to the International Criminal Court. Engagingly written and fully illustrated, Human Rights in Latin America creates an important niche among human rights and Latin American textbooks. Ample supplementary resources—including discussion questions, interdisciplinary reading lists, filmographies, online resources, internship opportunities, and instructor assignments—make this an especially valuable text for use in human rights courses.

Freedom on the Offensive

Freedom on the Offensive PDF Author: William Michael Schmidli
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501765167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
In Freedom on the Offensive, William Michael Schmidli illuminates how the Reagan administration's embrace of democracy promotion was a defining development in US foreign relations in the late twentieth century. Reagan used democracy promotion to refashion the bipartisan Cold War consensus that had collapsed in the late 1960s amid opposition to the Vietnam War. Over the course of the 1980s, the initiative led to a greater institutionalization of human rights—narrowly defined to include political rights and civil liberties and to exclude social and economic rights—as a US foreign policy priority. Democracy promotion thus served to legitimize a distinctive form of US interventionism and to underpin the Reagan administration's aggressive Cold War foreign policies. Drawing on newly available archival materials, and featuring a range of perspectives from top-level policymakers and politicians to grassroots activists and militants, this study makes a defining contribution to our understanding of human rights ideas and the projection of American power during the final decade of the Cold War. Using Reagan's undeclared war on Nicaragua as a case study in US interventionism, Freedom on the Offensive explores how democracy promotion emerged as the centerpiece of an increasingly robust US human rights agenda. Yet, this initiative also became intertwined with deeply undemocratic practices that misled the American people, violated US law, and contributed to immense human and material destruction. Pursued through civil society or low-cost military interventions and rooted in the neoliberal imperatives of US-led globalization, Reagan's democracy promotion initiative had major implications for post–Cold War US foreign policy.

Drugs and Democracy in Latin America

Drugs and Democracy in Latin America PDF Author: Coletta Youngers
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9781588262547
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
While the U.S. has failed to reduce the supply of cocaine and heroin entering its borders, it has, however, succeeded in generating widespread, often profoundly damaging, consequences on democracy and human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Constructing Democracy

Constructing Democracy PDF Author: Elizabeth Jelin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367159245
Category : Civil rights
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This book analyzes the impact of past human rights violations on consolidation of new democracies. It focuses on the emergence of an international network of human rights organizations and on the strategic responses of Latin American militaries to international pressures to respect human rights.

Mixed Signals

Mixed Signals PDF Author: Kathryn Sikkink
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150172990X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
"Nowhere did two understandings of U.S. identity—human rights and anticommunism—come more in conflict with each other than they did in Latin America. To refocus U.S. policy on human rights and democracy required a rethinking of U.S. policy as a whole. It required policy makers to choose between policies designed to defeat communism at any cost and those that remain within the bounds of the rule of law."—from the Introduction Kathryn Sikkink believes that the adoption of human rights policy represents a positive change in the relationship between the United States and Latin America. In Mixed Signals she traces a gradual but remarkable shift in U.S. foreign policy over the last generation. By the 1970s, an unthinking anticommunist stance had tarnished the reputation of the U.S. government throughout Latin America, associating Washington with tyrannical and often brutally murderous regimes. Sikkink recounts the reemergence of human rights as a substantive concern, showing how external pressures from activist groups and the institution of a human rights bureau inside the State Department have combined to remake Washington's agenda, and its image, in Latin America. The current war against terrorism, Sikkink warns, could repeat the mistakes of the past unless we insist that the struggle against terrorism be conducted with respect for human rights and the rule of law.

Gender and the Politics of Rights and Democracy in Latin America

Gender and the Politics of Rights and Democracy in Latin America PDF Author: Maxine Molyneux
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403914117
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
This volume assesses one of the most important developments in contemporary Latin American women's movements: the engagement with rights-based discourses. Organised women have played a central role in the continued struggle for democracy in the region and with it gender justice. The foregrounding of human rights, and within them the recognition of women's rights, has offered women a strategic advantage in pursuing their goals of an inclusive citizenship. The country-based chapters analyse specific bodies of rights: rights and representation, domestic violence, labour rights, reproductive rights, legal advocacy, socio-economic rights, rights and ethnicity, and rights, the state and autonomy.

Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America

Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America PDF Author: Jane S. Jaquette
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Latin American women’s movements played important roles in the democratic transitions in South America during the 1980s and in Central America during the 1990s. However, very little has been written on what has become of these movements and their agendas since the return to democracy. This timely collection examines how women’s movements have responded to the dramatic political, economic, and social changes of the last twenty years. In these essays, leading scholar-activists focus on the various strategies women’s movements have adopted and assess their successes and failures. The book is organized around three broad topics. The first, women’s access to political power at the national level, is addressed by essays on the election of Michelle Bachelet in Chile, gender quotas in Argentina and Brazil, and the responses of the women’s movement to the “Bolivarian revolution” in Venezuela. The second topic, the use of legal strategies, is taken up in essays on women’s rights across the board in Argentina, violence against women in Brazil, and gender in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru. Finally, the international impact of Latin American feminists is explored through an account of their participation in the World Social Forum, an assessment of a Chilean-led project carried out by women’s organizations in several countries to hold governments to the promises they made at international conferences in Cairo and Beijing, and an account of cross-border organizing to address femicides and domestic abuse in the Juárez-El Paso border region. Jane S. Jaquette provides the historical and political context of women’s movement activism in her introduction, and concludes the volume by engaging contemporary debates about feminism, civil society, and democracy. Contributors. Jutta Borner, Mariana Caminotti, Alina Donoso, Gioconda Espina, Jane S. Jaquette, Beatriz Kohen, Julissa Mantilla Falcón, Jutta Marx, Gabriela L. Montoya, Flávia Piovesan, Marcela Ríos Tobar, Kathleen Staudt, Teresa Valdés, Virginia Vargas