Prologue

In 2019, CELS is celebrating 40 years in existence. Although the historical context at the time of its founding has been widely analyzed, we are interested here in recalling that in 1979 – in addition to the onslaught of state terrorism – the military government waged a campaign to stigmatize and discredit “human rights,” the family members of people detained and disappeared, and the growing social movement that managed to keep from succumbing to terror. The target of that campaign, designed by publicity agencies and in which many media outlets participated, was not just a group of organizations but the notion of “human rights” itself, depicted as advancing an “anti-Argentine campaign.”

This anniversary entices us almost irresistibly to take stock, with the latent risks of making comparisons between two very different moments in history, and with the difficulty inherent in interpreting the present without the benefit of the passage of time. This moment in time also prompts us to reflect on the validity of “human rights” as the pivot articulating social struggles, or as a realm for charting paths.

In Latin America and since the mid-2000s, distinct political expressions that reached the halls of government were able to reduce poverty, although the region as a whole has continued to be one of the world’s most unequal and violent areas. When in many countries these expressions were replaced by other ideological projects – via electoral means or institutional coups – the processes that aspired to social inclusion suffered drastic setbacks. The governments following this “Latin American progressive cycle” put together an economic program to reconcentrate wealth using formally democratic models of government. With slogans of pacification and consensus, these processes (which extend beyond the region and the Global South) produce exclusion, increase levels of state and social violence, and result in societies that are ever more unequal.

These political projects, with more violent state models, have demonstrated their ability to limit democratic life. Many of those who uphold these paradigms utilize the formal mechanisms of democracy to reduce it from within – with additional laws and regulations, or with policies that strain existing frameworks. They rely on punitive institutions (such as the police or migration departments), on media companies and, in some countries, on the Armed Forces as well.

These alliances propose and pursue a shrunken democracy. With the aim of building quick consensus, they articulate discourses marked by dichotomies: to achieve growth, it is necessary to impinge on economic and social rights; to achieve security, freedom and physical integrity must be sacrificed; to guarantee order, the possibilities of organizing and protesting must be limited. The consequences of these exclusionary economic projects are presented as being necessary for laying the economic, political and social foundations that will make growth viable.

Curtailing acquired rights and denying other new rights emerges as the path for putting society in “order.” These models are successful where these dichotomies are able to take root. And so poor people, women, LGTTBIQ persons, migrants, along with trade unions and social organizations, are blamed for the problems that countries face and stigmatized, persecuted and criminalized. Thus, there is a heightening of the inequalities that, in and of themselves, would be enough to evince the validity and need for the human rights paradigm and the challenges they entail for the movement that asserts those rights.

Over the course of recent decades, we have built human rights as a horizon and as an approach. As a horizon, it guides our actions: the promotion of modes of social organization that protect life and integrity and ensure the full exercise of economic, social, cultural and political rights. As an approach, it serves as a perspective for analyzing and intervening in contemporary problems. That viewpoint is what cuts across this Report, which is not a full accounting of what we do, but rather an invitation to readers to look at different aspects of what is occurring from the perspective of the rights at stake (whether under threat or already razed) and to get involved in devising joint actions.

From this viewpoint, we want to set out some of the core issues that we consider to be central today to a broad discussion about the kind of democracy we want to build – in the present and in the future.

A first issue is that of participation, a notion that sometimes seems to be devoid of meaning, either because it is understood as the mere expression of opinion, or because it has been invoked so many times and implemented so few.