Leaning on Rights

This chapter was produced by Camila Barretto Maia, Juliana Miranda, Macarena Fernández Hofmann and Raísa Ortiz Cetra, members of CELS working team. We are grateful to Edurne Cárdenas, Vanina Escales, Manuel Tufró, Mauricio Vázquez and Óscar Patricio Rojas for their valuable contributions.

On October 28, 2018, the Brazilian electoral campaign ended in victory for retired Army Captain Jair Bolsonaro, to the shock of many. The direction of this change was predictable. However, the result was surprising given the president-elect’s political rhetoric and positions against human rights. Bolsonaro had devoted his nearly 30 years in politics to paying tribute to torturers and defending the Brazilian military dictatorship, which is still called the Revolution of 1964. During his campaign, he announced that he would be “incapable of loving a homosexual child: I would prefer to lose them in an accident.” In reference to the drug dealing in the favelas, he said if a police officer comes into a community and “kills 10, 15 or 20, he should be decorated, not prosecuted.” When the results of the primaries came in, he promised to put “a final end to all forms of activism.”

These openly anti-rights opinions broke with agreements that had structured the public debate since the re-democratization of Brazil. If, in four previous elections, the majority had elected the Workers’ Party (PT), with a program focused on reducing inequalities and moderate levels of confrontation with opposing sectors, in 2018 the majority showed its support and its tolerance for a candidate with authoritarian, violent and discriminatory ideas. Moreover, this happened in a context of a crisis in Brazil’s political system, deepened by the leaders of the institutional coups of 2016, and the high unemployment, which had nearly doubled since 2014. This political, economic and social context may have contributed to the effectiveness of a campaign underpinned by prejudice, bitterness and social frustration.

Bolsonaro’s ideas are nothing new. In the five years prior, they had made the rounds among diverse sectors and social, economic, religious and political groups. Nor are they exclusive to Brazil: they were expressed by candidates who came into power in the United States, Hungary and the Philippines. If we analyze the arguments and narratives behind the Bolsonaro campaign, they share certain elements echoed recently across various South American countries. In Brazil, their promoters won the election; in other cases, they are part of the governing coalition or judicial and legislative powers, form interest or religious groups that pressure the direction taken in political debates, appealing to and mobilizing the population with different degrees of adhesion and presence.

Core aspects of Latin American neoliberalism underpin the programs of the right-wing in the Southern Cone: with nuances in each country, they argue the need for an efficient State in order to justify socioeconomic austerity and cuts and/or reorientation of public policies. Today, amidst economic crises aggravated by neoliberal policies, more and more political actors seek electoral support by painting certain social sectors as internal enemies, blaming them for the problems, in an effort to pit them against society as a whole. These campaigns invest in operations to describe women – or feminism – LBGTTIQ persons, people who live in slums, migrants, the incarcerated population and the human rights movement as privileged groups that get in the way of societal wellbeing. The anti-rights sectors in Chile bring pressure to bear on the purpose of policies and influence presidential speeches. Two of the first measures adopted by Sebastián Piñera reflect this orientation. The first has to do with abortion: a year before he took office, Chile had decriminalized the voluntary interruption of pregnancy in three events, but when he became president a protocol was adopted to allow for individual or institutional conscientious objection. The second was the withdrawal from the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Chile justified this withdrawal based on the need to “bring order to the house” and guarantee sovereignty, asserting the “alarming disorder” that migration would mean for that country.

In Argentina, the Cambiemos government constructed internal enemies and threats under the broad slogan of “putting an end to drug trafficking.” Instead of starting with a precise diagnostic of organized crime as a problem, highly complex matters were reduced to a narrative based on the alarm about drugs and the struggle against crime as an internal enemy. A growing link drawn by official rhetoric between crime and migration formed the foundation for modifying core aspects of the Migrations Act and facilitated deportation procedures. There was also an organized campaign to disseminate rhetoric counter to women’s autonomy and rights promoted by diverse political and social sectors, although in this case, after massive public demonstrations, the Executive Branch allowed a bill to legalize abortion to be submitted in Congress.

In Uruguay, at least since 2018, there has been a rise in rhetoric questioning the exercise of rights associated with gender and a tougher stance on security issues. These narratives, driven or expanded by sectors in opposition to the Frente Amplio, bring weight to bear on the public debate. In addition to the campaign to repeal the Integral Law for Trans Persons, the campaign “Vivir sin miedo” (Living without fear) managed to collect 400,000 signatures for a referendum on constitutional reform aimed at increasing sentences, limiting early prison release and alternative sentences to incarceration, and the militarization of the public security forces.

Contemporary studies on the new leaders of the right indicate a trend to adopt discourse that is antagonistic towards low-income sectors or groups with less access to rights. Donald Trump and Marine LePen, for instance, emphasize the need to conserve hierarchies and privileges that they consider natural. They pit this against immigration – and foreignness in general – and the changes in the heteronormative, patriarchal family model. They suggest that the historically privileged sectors must defend themselves as if they were a “silent majority” under threat¹. Underlying this appeal to a supposed threat from intense minority groups is a political and substantive questioning of the notion of equality that proposes it not be reduced to a formal or legal perspective.

The confluence of the numerous and powerful social, political, judicial and religious sectors in anti-rights narratives has an impact on democratic values. On issues such as the right to life and personal integrity, to non-discrimination and migration, these groups appeal to society by disputing the purpose, proposing to restrict the scope of constitutional principles and international human rights law.

These explanations regarding social reality identify an adversary and legitimize possible courses of action and mobilization². Their conservative versions share the appeal to moral values, anger, frustration and fear. These constructs of “others” or “enemies&rdquo³; lead to public policies that restrict the rights of those who were previously cast as dangerous. In its most extreme versions, this kind of rhetoric pits the human rights movement against the majority of society, and aims to build popularity through speeches and policies to create antagonism with the human rights paradigm. The capacity to mobilize broad sectors in defense of rights, which is different in every society, constitutes an important limit on the advance of anti-rights rhetoric. But to the extent that this rhetoric manages to take root in society and prove effective, it becomes a critical challenge for policy committed to equality and human rights.

With this outlook, this chapter aims to characterize the rhetoric behind the political framework rolled out in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay in regard to three core themes on the current agenda for human rights activism: gender equality and non-discrimination; migrant rights; and security policy. To this aim, we select recent scenarios of social and political debate, situations of heavy controversy in which it is possible to identify the actors involved and analyze the arguments and meanings with regard to the human rights at stake.

1. Sexual rights as threat or privilege

Persecution of teachers in Brazil: “A ‘gender ideology’ is being imposed on children in schools”

In 2004, lawyer Miguel Nagib created Escola Sem Partido (Nonpartisan School), a movement presented as a student-parent initiative to take action in the face of “political-ideological contamination” in the schools, from elementary through high school.

Initially it promoted the ideal of the minimal State and included a denouncement of the “Marxist indoctrination” in schools. The movement was little known until early 2010, when it began to gain support from the right, particularly right-wing religious sectors.

Then Escola Sem Partido merged with the fight to combat “gender ideology,” a term originally circulated by the Vatican to question the growing global movement in favor of women’s rights, reproductive rights and gender identity⁴.

These religious groups focused their attention on education when education initiatives to prevent gender violence and LGTBI hatred began to expand. Catholics and evangelicals coordinated their presence in participatory forums, spaces that structure education policy in Brazil, to promote alarmism about the susceptibility of children to the promotion of an ideology at odds with the forging of a male or female identity. In 2014, they managed to have gender-related subjects excluded from the National Education Plan, and in 2015, from state and municipal plans. Implicit in this was the goal of a curriculum to reestablish a supposedly morally superior order centered on sexual difference as the hierarchical pattern, mandatory heterosexuality, gender binarism as a political-cultural scheme, and the negation of trans lives and identities.

By 2015, Escola Sem Partido had gained greater notoriety as a movement. That year it launched a campaign for mothers and fathers to send extra-judicial notifications to the schools, threatening to report any directors or teachers who engaged in certain conduct deemed “illegal,” ranging from “the promotion of their own values” to “manipulation” of subject content⁵. This growth also led to the presentation of bills in Congress and state and municipal legislatures in Brazil structured around the concept of “cultural Marxism”: the enemy constructed by reactionary sectors to alert people about a “strategy to manipulate minds.⁶”

The promotion of surveillance of teachers spread in the following years. In 2017, a municipal legislator for São Paolo made surprise visits to public institutions to “verify if there was any ideological indoctrination going on,” if there were teachers wearing t-shirts with the PT (Workers Party) or MST (Landless Workers Movement), those types of things.⁷” In October 2018, before the second round of elections, a state deputy-elect from the PSL (Liberal Social Party) asked students to take videos of their teachers if they engaged in “political-party or ideological propaganda.⁸”

In its beginning, Escola Sem Partido took the position that education should be neutral. Over time, it began to openly advocate for the prohibition in schools of content contrary to its values and policy options, which they attribute to parents. It upheld the idea of school as an extension of the home, doing away with the concept of educational institutions as social and public institutions that protect rights. The slogan “meu filho, minhas regras” (my child, my rules), the title of a Facebook page created in 2016, is intended as antagonistic to the feminist motto of “my body, my rules.”

Reaction against the Integral Law for Trans Persons in Uruguay: “Privileges granted to some, trampling the rights of the rest of society”

In April 2019, the Executive Branch of Uruguay signed the rules governing the Integral Law for Trans Persons, following a favorable vote in Parliament in October 2018. This was one of the most progressive policies in the world in response to the reality of a population that has historically faced stigmatization, discrimination and social and state violence⁹. The First National Census of Trans Persons in 2016 revealed extreme vulnerability of rights in that country, leading the new law to establish affirmative protection measures. A few days later, two representatives for the National Party, Carlos Iafigliola – pre-presidential candidate and member of the evangelical church Misión Vida para las Naciones – and Álvaro Dastugue, launched a campaign to collect signatures to repeal the law by referendum. Under the slogan "Todos somos iguales" (We are all the same), they argued that the new legislation “granted privileges to some, while trampling the rights of the rest of society.¹⁰”

With these words, opponents of the law employed reverse rhetoric: they attacked the promotion of rights of a group or sector by denouncing it as a situation of inequality or supposed privileges. In this case, the campaign’s proponents resorted to the argument of “taxpayers’ rights,” who would be forced to

The argument creates false opposition between “trans persons” and “taxpayers,” as if trans people weren’t taxpayers or susceptible to cancer themselves.

The Integral Law for Trans Persons also faced objection as a threat to families. Although its wording establishes something else, its detractors claimed it authorized sex changes and hormone treatment for children even when their parents were opposed. Furthermore, these claims deliberately omitted that Uruguayan legislation on childhood and adolescence provides for incremental autonomy as a principle. This echoes similar rhetoric in Brazil with “meu filho, minhas regras” (my child, my rules) and more recently in Argentina, “con mis hijos no te metas” (don’t mess with my children).

The law was also set within the context of a broader narrative: as part of movement that seeks to impose an ideology on society – taken as synonymous with “falseness” – that denies that “we are all born male or female,” as contrary to “the laws of nature”¹² and, therefore, “to science.” These groups resorted to a supposed scientific paradigm as a battering ram to assert social organization based on biology, the naturalization of hierarchies based on sex and the denial of the rights of anyone who does not fit that binary model.

On March 26, 2019, Deputies Iafigliola and Dastugue presented 70,000 signatures to the Electoral Court in support of the referendum, exceeding the minimum required. While the referendum did not ultimately obtain the organizers’ expected results, the campaign had already been effective by exposing to public opinion rhetoric that goes against the protection of a group whose rights have been violated.

Opposition to abortion legalization in Argentina: “Let’s save both lives”

After decades of work by the movement of women, lesbians and trans persons, the Argentinean Congress debated a bill to legalize the voluntary interruption of pregnancy in March 2018. Since 1921, abortion is not a crime in Argentina if the pregnancy is the consequence of rape or puts the life or health of the pregnant person at risk. In 2012, Supreme Court decision “F., A.L.” established broad criteria of interpretation for the cases established in 1921 and reaffirmed the right to have access to legal abortion. The bill debated in 2018 proposed making abortion legal in all circumstances.

In the midst of intense speeches, the Chamber of Deputies passed the bill on the morning of June 14 while a mass demonstration was going on outside. On August 8, the bill was rejected in the Senate by a difference of seven votes. Although it did not pass in the end, the issue of the right to abortion remained at the center of the public agenda with support from multiple groups, sectors and individuals who had not previously declared their position before the congressional debate.

Going back to the decade of the nineties, the National Campaign for Legal, Safe and Free Abortions was officially launched at the National Gathering of Women in 2005 and then expanded and took root elsewhere in the country. Its symbol is a green bandana alluding to the white one worn by the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and its slogan, “Sex education to decide. Contraception to not abort. Legal abortion to not die.” Over the years, other sectors have also gotten organized to oppose the right to abortion. Since 1998, churches and religious institutions from all over Argentina have convened a mobilization every March 25, established as the “day of the child about to be born” during the presidency of Carlos Menem. They also organize a “march of baby booties” in front of the national Congress building. As the legislative debate of 2018 approached, conservative organizations, the Catholic Church and right wing sector of evangelical churches coordinated to set up a counter-campaign with the slogan, “Let’s save both lives.” As a counterpart to the “green wave,” they chose a light blue bandana.

In response to the argument regarding the high mortality rate caused by clandestine abortions, opposition sectors negate the possibility of women making autonomous decisions. Argentina’s vice president, Gabriela Michetti, sustained in an interview prior to the legislative debate, “You have an embryo in your body, but it’s not your body.¹³” Along the same lines, an editorial in La Nación just before the Senate debate asserted:

Deputy Béccar Varela used her words to put another key argument from this opposing sector on the table, claiming that women and girls “are born to be mothers,” an essentialist narrative that excludes men, who purportedly are not born to be fathers, nor is their responsibility questioned. According to this worldview, the decision not to be a mother is taken as an objection to the “natural” order of the heterosexual nuclear family. This is the line of thinking of the editorial published in La Nación on February 1, 2019 on girls who “decide” to become mothers. Such praise for the “women’s natural maternal instinct” qualifies any other decision as an “error induced” by the feminist movement and ignores that, if a girl is pregnant, it is because there was a rape. The naturalization of maternity in girls naturalizes the patriarchal violence that causes it.

Other actors suggested that opposing abortion is the position most compatible with human rights. Senator Esteban Bullrich stated, “‘Ni una menos’ (Not one less) can also be applied when a pregnancy is interrupted for a baby girl in gestation, because she is being killed.¹⁶” In another argument regarding how penalization can actually be a means to protect women’s rights, and even though abortion due to rape has been legal since 1921, it was suggested that legalization could foster the cover-up of incidents of rape.

The construct created by forces opposed to the struggle for safe abortions is that “the person about to be born” already possesses subjectivity and rights. They allege that the baby’s innocence is threatened by the affirmation of the autonomy of the pregnant person. That exercise of liberty immediately turns her into a victimizer. The woman with sovereignty over her own decisions is presented as a monstrous image and, therefore, subject to deprivation of her rights and alienation of her body.

2. We versus others

Restriction of migrants’ rights in Chile: “The time has come to bring this house we share to order, this house that belongs to everyone”¹⁷

In Chile, migration policy continues to be regulated by Decree-Law 1094 of 1975, known as the Aliens Act (Ley de Extranjería), a policy held over from the civil-military dictatorship, under which the logic of national sovereignty prevails and migration is viewed as a threat. Despite the demands and pressure from social organizations and the progress made in other countries of the region, the need for migration legislation enacted in democracy did not take root in the public agenda in Chile until the 2017 elections, except it did so from a perspective that ran counter to the expansion of rights.

During the electoral campaign, there were candidates who sought to mobilize concerns over security against migrants in some sectors and constructed the idea that tightening control of migration would be a solution to these problems. The far-right candidate José Antonio Kast Rist proposed closing the border with Bolivia to control drug trafficking, sustaining that there were growing numbers of migrants coming into Chile who supported these activities¹⁸.

The extreme rhetoric proposed closing the borders to put the brakes on the migration flow and sought to directly link irregular migration to drug traffic, without taking into account the diverse reasons that drive people to migrate without permission. In terms of discourse, irregular migration was conceived as a crime warranting treatment similar to the “war on drugs.”

Another argument that shows up even in more moderate rhetoric is the distinction drawn between migrants supposedly associated with crime and those who can contribute to society. This division aims to stratify migrants into those who are welcome and those who must not cross borders. This hierarchy is established in practice based on characteristics such as nationality, class and level of formal education, and not on people’s mobility rights. Ultimately, it promotes selective migration policy, categorizing the migrant population as desirable and undesirable.

During his winning campaign, Piñera incorporated the need to lay out clear rules and reinforce the mechanisms of migration control to “expedite and make deportation less bureaucratic” in the case of migrants who have committed a crime at some time in their life, even if they have already served their sentence.

Fulvio Rossi, former member of the Socialist Party (PS), who ran as an independent candidate, mobilized positions against migration in his quest for electoral support. One of his propaganda posters proposed: “No more illegal immigration. Law of immediate expulsion for criminals.¹⁹” In response to criticism of that campaign from the Secretariat of Migrant Socialist Youth of Chile and other actors, he said:

A single idea underpins this type of rhetoric: deporting and discriminating against the foreigner – the “other” – to protect “us,” the nationals. Linking migration to crime serves as an excuse to reverse the logic of protecting those who migrate: they will no longer be entitled to policies of integration and inclusion, but rather the parameter of “justice” will be to get tougher on crime, because they are responsible for the lack of security affecting nationals. For this reason, the efficacy of deportation procedures was presented as a key objective of migration policy.

Once Piñera took office, he began to implement his project. He presented a battery of administrative and legislative measures in April 2018, including a new bill, to “bring the house to order” and “close the doors with a machete to those who come to do us harm.” At the same time, he established a special regularization program that serves in practice to identify migrants with criminal records and deport them.

Limiting access to healthcare for migrants in Argentina: “I am not xenophobic nor am I saying we should build a wall, but this year 400,000 poor Latin Americans entered Argentina, for whom the country must take responsibility. Is this sustainable over time?²¹

Until 2004, Argentina’s Videla Law was in force, a policy inherited from the last civil-military dictatorship that did not recognize migrant rights, particularly economic and social rights. In light of the demands and mobilization from many sectors, Law 25,871 was passed in 2003, which recognized equal rights among citizens and foreigners to education, social and health services. While this was already a matter of controversy, mainly in border provinces, different political stakeholders have more recently begun to seek support by putting this expansion of rights into question.

In October 2017, Argentina’s ambassador in the Bolivian city of La Paz, Normando Álvarez García, asked the government of Evo Morales to sign a reciprocity agreement in which both countries would agree to provide free medical care in public hospitals to their respective citizens. The Bolivian Minister of Foreign Relations replied that there was no need for such an agreement, given that all health services are already guaranteed in that country²². The governors of Salta and Neuquén made similar moves with their peers in the border departments of Bolivia and Chile.

These positions raised the notion of “healthcare tourism” to sustain that there are people who do not have access to these services in their home countries and migrate to use Argentina’s free healthcare system. They argue that free access to university education and healthcare must be contingent upon reciprocity from the migrant’s the country of origin²³. While permanent residents would be allowed all the same social rights under equal conditions as nationals, other migrants would be subject to the decisions, in this sense, of their respective governments. Thus, the principle of equality is shifted onto the State and ceases to be between people. Another argument raised is that access to rights must be tied to contributive capacity, presumed null in the case of migrants with temporary or irregular status in the right wing's narrative. This focus produces social segregation and discrimination of many migrants who live in Argentina. According to statistics from the National Migrations Office, 62% of residences granted in 2018 were temporary.

On February 27, 2018, national deputy for the Cambiemos coalition, Luis Petri (Unión Cívica Radical), presented a bill to modify the National Migration Act to charge migrants who are not permanent residents for access to healthcare and education. The project was halted due to disagreement among the governing party²⁴, but other similar legislation presented by deputies from Jujuy and Buenos Aires²⁵ continues under debate in Congress.

Not long after, the Jujuy minister of health submitted a bill proposing to charge a fee to foreign persons in transit²⁶. In February 2019, that province passed Law 6,116, promoted by Governor Gerardo Morales (Cambiemos), bringing an end to free provincial health services for “transient” migrants. The Provincial System of Health Insurance for Foreigners imposed an “insurance” fee for anyone without permanent residence requiring public medical service in the province.

National Minister of the Interior Rogelio Frigerio declared his support for the law.

This type of rhetoric brings traditional aspects of nationalism to bear, creating an antagonism of exclusion that pits the interests of nationals against the rights of migrant persons, who end up being rejected. Provincial deputy for the UCR, Alberto Bernis, asserted that new law in Jujuy aims to “defend the rights of Argentines who leave the country and are mistreated abroad.²⁷” Deputy Marcelo Nasif took an even tougher stance: “This is not revenge; these are acts of justice for foreign persons in transit who must maintain their healthcare.”

3. Lethal weapons as protectors of life

Promoting the private use of lethal weapons in Brazil: “Weapons can be used to kill or to saves lives”

The liberalization of the use of firearms is a recurring theme in the political career and speeches of Bolsonaro and his children. During his candidacy, he used a hand gesture to turn a gun into the symbol of his campaign. And then as president, the debate about liberalizing the bearing of arms took on a central role in his political agenda in 2018.

The issue had been the subject of a law promoted by the PT party in 2003, the Disarmament Statute, which established the the registration of weapons and munitions, manufacturers and vendors as a requirement. It also implemented stricter controls with regard to possession: registration required proof of necessity every three years, a clean criminal record and technical and psychological capacity to handle the weapon. The bearing of arms outside the home was prohibited, except for agents of the security and intelligence forces, penitentiary officials, judges and prosecutors and private security officials. The law also prohibited “the commercialization of firearms and munitions throughout national territory,” with few exceptions. It established that the applicability of this prohibition would depend on the outcome of a referendum that was ultimately carried out two years later with the question, “Should the sale of firearms and munitions be prohibited in Brazil?” 63.94% said it should not be prohibited. This generated a unique situation: even though the referendum was limited to the issue of sale and did not address the other restrictions, it revealed general support for the liberalization of firearms. Although the Statute is, however, still in force, the referendum is a crucial precedent for understanding the current defense of liberalizing the sale, possession and bearing of arms in Brazil.

In the context of the 2005 referendum, two parliamentary fronts were formed in Congress: “Brazil without Arms” and “For Right to Legitimate Defense.” The campaign of this second block was built on the fears present in Brazil’s social and cultural imagination and based on the assertion that the prohibition would leave “honest” people unarmed, while criminals would continue to have weapons. Thus, instead of working to reduce arms trafficking, it proposed moving forward with the liberalization of legal weapons sales.

On Aug. 3, 2018, Bolsonaro stated in a televised interview that he wanted to “make the 2005 referendum count.” “We must respect the will of the people who decided they want the right to possess a firearm, purchase one and have it inside their home.²⁸” On July 6, 2018, he stated that “the Disarmament Statute could not be left as such, insofar as it irresponsibly and deliberately disarms upstanding citizens while leaving criminals with a weapon.” Underpinning that narrative is the legitimate and illegitimate uses of weapons, arising from the “good” or “evil” of the person wielding them. On the extreme end of this logic is the affirmation that, depending on who’s using them, lethal weapons do not kill: they save lives.

Children played a key role in Bolsonaro’s campaign, who was filmed showing a 4-year-old girl how to simulate a gun with her hands. In another he asks a boy, “Do you know how to shoot?”

In reaction to criticism, the candidate stepped up his tone, saying his own children were firing real guns from the time they were five He considered it a parent’s duty to teach their child what a firearm is and what it’s for “because in the communities [favelas], there are 8-year-olds using guns bigger than they are; that is a reality.” Confronted with the fact that the Statute on Children and Adolescents (ECA) prohibits the sale or delivery of weapons to minors, the candidate reacted, “The ECA needs to be torn up and thrown in the toilet. The reality is very different from the theory behind it.²⁹”

Government backs use of lethal force by police in Argentina: “There used to be a campaign of blaming police; today we support them”

On Dec. 8, 2017, Luis Chocobar, a local police officer in Avellaneda, province of Buenos Aires, was off duty when he intervened in the wake of a robbery in the La Boca neighborhood, city of Buenos Aires, in which a tourist had been injured. The attackers fled, Chocobar pursued them and shot one of them in the back, Juan Pablo Kukoc, 18, who died on the pavement. Chocobar was charged with “aggravated homicide for exceeding the line of duty.” At the time of this report, the case had already gone to trial.

Despite the fact that Chocobar did not work for a force reporting to the national government, President Mauricio Macri and Minister of Security Patricia Bullrich met with Chocobar, who had already been prosecuted, and transformed the case into a core component of the Macri administration’s communications policy. Minister Bullrich stated to the media, “We, the government, have flipped what has happened here. Here, the victimizers seemed like the victims and the victims, the victimizers.³⁰” This type of rhetoric forges the idea that while the police used to be incriminated without grounds by actors associated with the human rights movement, the government was now proposing a “new doctrine” making lethal police action always legitimate.

The Argentinean government launched a series of messages around this incident about and for the Judiciary. After meeting with Chocobar, the minister stated that the government would “support his legal defense; we believe the judge is going to understand our reasoning.³¹” Two weeks later, when the Criminal Chamber confirmed that Chocobar would be prosecuted, the president stated:

With this statement, he identified Kukoc as a murderer and omitted the fact that Chocobar killed a person who was fleeing when lives were not in danger. The Argentinean authorities ignored the right to life of those killed by the police forces.

Precedents for this kind of rhetoric had already been set in the government’s stance on other cases with fatal victims. While the judicial investigation was underway into the disappearance of Santiago Maldonado in the province of Chubut, the government laid out a discourse of corporate defense of the action by the Argentinean National Gendarmes (GNA), which had entered the Pu Lof community in pursuit of a group of demonstrators who had mounted a roadblock. After being missing for 77 days and then found dead in the Chubut River, different officials tried to water down government and GNA responsibility, and attacked the human rights organizations demanding clarification of the facts. Minister Bullrich stated:

Three months after Maldonado’s disappearance, The Argentinean Naval Prefecturef on a group from the Mapuche community in Villa Mascardi, province of Río Negro, killing Rafael Nahuel Salvo, 22. Once again, the Minister defended their actions and adopted the PNA’s version of the events as her own. “We do not have to justify what the security forces do in the framework of a court-ordered task. We assume the veracity of the version the PNA gives us.³⁴” Finally, in May 2019, the justice system prosecuted one of the prefects for aggravated homicide. This rhetoric of corporate defense of police action has been mutating in the direction of the idea that the police are treated unfairly and inculpated. It has gone from statements linked to specific cases, to a “new doctrine” that upholds the use of lethal force in any circumstances. These arguments contradict the experience of those who have experienced police violence and their families, who face extremely high levels of impunity for the deaths and injury caused by the security forces³⁵. According to the events, these narratives seek to forge antagonism in which the police waver between the role of heroes or victims; and their adversaries are the sectors of society that have always defended a paradigm of democratic security, particularly, those who denounce human rights violations and demand they be investigated and prosecuted.

The agenda behind this rhetoric became evident when the Ministry of Security approved a new regulation on the use of firearms by the Police and Federal Security Forces (Resolution 956/2018). This policy broke the paradigm for using lethal force only as an exception, authorizing the use of firearms in diverse scenarios where “imminent danger” is perceived to exist. An editorial in La Nación on Dec. 16, 2018 expressed:

The construction of this rhetoric accuses human rights organizations of placing blame on the police and preventing them from doing their jobs effectively. The Ministry took measures of little practical impact in the last period, that are framed within their effort to solidify a political narrative: the “Restitution” program (Resolution 1015/2018) and the Human Rights Guarantee Unit for the Security Forces. Both measures seek to make amends to police when their actions are investigated and to protect them from the groups that attack them. In this sense, the minister said:

This is how they aimed to build the narrative of human rights organizations not as advocates of the right to life, but as obstacles in the way of a safe life.

4. Rhetoric is reality

The scenarios presented in this chapter allow us to identify common elements across the rhetoric used by those who promote anti-rights in some countries of the region. There is continuity in their arguments. They re-signify or reverse meanings. They elicit antagonism against the basic values and principles of democracy and human rights such as life and equality. Discourse grounded in moral and religious values is presented as the language of rights. The rights of children and women are asserted from a patriarchal-paternalistic, authoritarian perspective that denies their capacity for agency and liberty. They claim to be protecting the life of pregnant persons by imposing pregnancy, labor and birth beyond that person’s will. They invoke the protection of children against “gender ideology” and “political-ideological propaganda” in schools, hindering their access to a plural, democratic education. They claim to defend children and adolescents from the “promotion of trans identity,” but leave them at the mercy of the worst and most violent forms of discrimination.

Both the campaign to repeal the Integral Law for Trans Persons in Uruguay and the debates concerning migrants’ access to social rights in Argentina involve rhetoric that pushes the idea of equality to oppose policies that sought to guarantee rights to social groups in a situation of structural disadvantage. Sectors that have always faced discrimination, such as the trans population and migrant persons, are represented as privileged groups who take advantage of scarce State resources and, as such, violate the rights of society as a whole. Exclusion – and ultimately, violence – is justified on the basis of denial of the structural inequality.

With some nuances, this same idea is brought to bear in the rhetoric around security, which plays a notable role when it comes to justifying and promoting the exclusion (and even death) of some. The “some” are always the “other,” the murderer (in fact, or potential), the criminal, the drifter, the migrant. The goal becomes the “struggle” against these threats. Basic principles like legality, necessity and proportionality in the use of force are seen as arguments against policy and obstacles to the defense of the population. Those who sustain elemental issues, such as the right to life must prevail over the right to property, are treated as the “enemies” of order or of “common citizens.”

This type of rhetoric runs counter to the concept of the State as guarantor of rights and promoter of equality, and to the movements that have defended, asserted and worked to further uphold human rights. The private setting, embodied in the traditional patriarchal, heteronormative family, is presented as superior and to the detriment of the public realm. The individual freedom to bear firearms is defended as a fundamental right. At the same time as rhetoric removes the State’s responsibility to ensure human rights, it also asserts a reduction of control over the State as a potential violator of those same rights. In this movement, police agents receive the total support of the State to make use of lethal violence.

Each country’s capacity to mobilize responses and actions to protect different rights and those of the collectives affected will be key when it comes to containing the advance of this type of rhetoric and restrictive policies. In Argentina, the defense led by human rights, union, women and social organizations who take to the streets encompasses a large part of the rights agenda. In critical moments, this activism has curtailed the advance of rhetoric and restrictive policies like those mentioned in this chapter.

These are essential issues to think about when it comes to defending guarantees in a context in which human rights are painted as biased, removed from the interests of society as a whole and, above all, unfair. When rhetoric, measures and actions of this kind are put forward and executed by those who dispute and exercise political power, they have the effect of limiting, restricting or denying the rights of lower socio-economic sectors, who have historically suffered discrimination. In an increasingly violent region with profound inequalities, the social environment being fostered is framed in segregation and hate.