Human Rights in Latin America: A Politics of Terror and Hope
July 30th, 2010re-posted from the H-Net list on Human Rights:
Sonia Cardenas. Human Rights in Latin America: A Politics of Terror and Hope. Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 256 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8122-4197-6.
Reviewed by Cesar Seveso (Department of History and Global Studies Program, University of Houston)
Published on H-Human-Rights (July, 2010)
Commissioned by Rebecca K. Root
Human Rights in the Classroom
Sonia Cardenas, a specialist on human rights and the author of Conflict and Compliance: State Responses to International Human Rights Pressure (2007), has three central concerns in her new book: the origins of human rights violations, the pathways to political reform, and the challenge of accountability in Latin America. The book, intended for undergraduate courses on human rights, synthesizes much of the most recent research in two hundred pages. In this regard, it is the first book to offer a clear, well-organized, and synthetic account of the post-1970s evolution of human rights in Latin America for an undergraduate audience.
The book starts with a short but useful explanation of the different types of human rights violations. Cardenas emphasizes that she is particularly interested in abuses against civil and political rights. While the author notes the unique contributions of Latin America in the evolution of international human rights norms–at the philosophical, political, and institutional levels–she nonetheless focuses on the abuses that have made the region infamous. The author analyzes, perhaps too briefly, the legacies of colonialism and early state formation in today’s human rights violations, and then jumps to a more detailed analysis of trends and cross-national dynamics after 1980. This chapter also describes differences in abuses over time; examines cross-national differences; and–again, perhaps too briefly–provides a comparison of human rights violations in Latin America and the rest of the world. Interestingly, Latin America has registered the “greatest overall improvement in human rights conditions” in the developing world after 2000 (p. 27). The chapter ends with summaries of the most prominent human rights abuses in Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Haiti–some of which are accompanied by short first-person accounts of human rights victims. This first chapter, like all the others in the book, contains a list of questions to stimulate class discussions; suggestions for additional readings, including memoirs and testimonials; a rich filmography; and a list of useful Web sites.
In her second chapter, Cardenas answers one of the most frequent questions anyone teaching human rights faces from shocked and puzzled undergraduate students: why do human beings torture and inflict pain on other human beings? Cardenas provides a very good summary of the most common explanations, which she terms “conventional wisdom,” from hatred to innate evil to cultural stereotypes. But Cardenas goes beyond this to address the topic from another perspective by including insights from social science. In this regard, she points to decision-making factors–rational actors decide whether or not to violate rights, based on cost-benefit calculations–and a wide array of ideological factors, spanning from anticommunism to racism, sexism, and patriarchy. Due to the significance of anticommunism and the national security doctrine in the ideological justification of human rights violations, it is not surprising that Cardenas devotes considerable space to the role played by the United States, with specific mention of Operation Condor and the School of the Americas. Finally, the author provides a framework for explaining state terror that takes into account the prevalence of exclusionary ideologies, domestic instability as the trigger for cost-benefit calculations, and the support for state terrorism facilitated by a weak democracy. The bibliography at the end of this chapter should perhaps also include Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006).
Both chapters 3 and 4 offer an institutional analysis of the global system of human rights governance–a dense network of international and regional organizations, human rights treaties, commissions, courts, and transnational advocacy networks. There is much to say in this respect, since, as Cardenas notes, “Latin America has one of the most developed region-wide mechanisms for regulating human rights,” which includes the American Convention on Human Rights, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (p. 83). Although both informative and needed in a book intended for undergraduate courses, the chapter on global governance is not as interesting as the one on transnational advocacy networks, which Cardenas calls “the key engines of human rights change” (p. 102). Indeed, the author shows how the hard work of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and local activists, such as the relatives of the detained-disappeared and religious groups, put pressure on governments abusing human rights. But, at the same time, she points to the new challenges raised by the vocal participation of human rights activists in transnational solidarity networks through three interesting examples: the use of the Internet by Mexico’s Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the fight of indigenous people against deforestation in the Amazon, and the struggle against femicide in Mexican maquilas. Cardenas’s goal is to highlight how globalization has created not only new opportunities for activists, but also “new demands and pressures that can produce new human rights violations” (p. 121).
Chapter 5 addresses how and why pressures from those networks translate, or fail to translate, into institutional reforms. Cardenas here analyzes several subregional cases–the southern cone, Central America, the Andean region, and the Caribbean–to show the interactions among human rights activism, political legitimacy, and internal conflict. Transnational networks can and do exert both symbolic and material pressure, the author concludes; and, even in the face of unrelenting violence and poverty, “ordinary people’s empathy for the way that other human beings are treated, their willingness to mobilize for the rights of others” makes it possible for human rights to change (p. 154).
Finally, Cardenas closes her book with a lively review of the most important moral and ethical dilemmas faced by post-dictatorial governments in Latin America. She first explains why accountability has been needed to construct solid democracies, yet has proven elusive and destabilizing at the same time. Once again, she brings to light the leading role played by these countries in pushing forward the struggle for human rights. Indeed, as the author notes, Latin America is the region of the world that has the largest concentration of truth commissions–a testament to past human rights abuses, but also of a resilient democratic culture. Cardenas explains the different mandates truth commissions have had over a twenty-year span. Her analysis of human rights trials clearly exposes the complexities that democratic governments face in their pursuit of retributive justice, as exemplified by the trials against the last Argentine military junta in 1985 and the arrest of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet in 1998 in London. In fact, as Cardenas notes, the Pinochet case is just one prominent example of a trend toward transnational justice that has also put U.S. courts at the heart of the fight for accountability in Latin America. The last chapter is undoubtedly the book’s most contemporary as it discusses the regional impact of the antidrug war and the global war on terror. On the one hand, U.S. military and police aid almost matches economic and social aid to the region. In fact, Colombia is the largest recipient of U.S. military aid outside the Middle East. On the other hand, the region has also seen the ascendancy of a new brand of left-of-center, charismatic national leaders, indisputably led by Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales, who have criticized the United States for imperial aspirations. Overall, Cardenas concludes, rising poverty, inequality, corruption, and a flexible definition of national security do much to entangle institutional reform and continue to keep alive the need for a continued human rights struggle.
The book has five well-chosen appendices, including the text of the American Convention of Human Rights, a list of the regional ratifiers of human rights treaties, human development indicators for Latin America, a list of sixteen internship opportunities to get students involved in human rights activism, and a list of twelve different suggested assignments for instructors. Once again, the appendices exemplify the author’s effort to turn her book into a useful classroom tool. This is a book that can satisfy even the most demanding instructors, and a paperback edition would make undergraduate students even happier. Cardenas’s analysis is always balanced, but at the same time she makes her points convincingly and forcefully. Scholars teaching human rights courses about Latin America and beyond will welcome this book.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at:
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Cesar Seveso. Review of Cardenas, Sonia, Human Rights in Latin America: A Politics of Terror and Hope. H-Human-Rights, H-Net Reviews. July, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29594
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
