Summary

Leaning on Rights

Rhetoric and policies to restrict human rights in the region

Full chapter in English here

Since our last issue, the progress of right-wing policies has affected human rights internationally and South America is no exception. The election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has, unsurprisingly, severely weakened the rights of minorities, as was promised in the far right presidential campaign. Uruguay – which had recently adopted one of the most progressive laws in the world enshrining the rights of transgender persons – held a referendum on repealing the law, a move that was ultimately defeated. In Argentina, pro-life campaigners co-opted the mainstream media and the political center amid the turmoil of the congressional debate on the legalization of abortion.

This chapter focuses on how the increased presence of right-wing policies on the subcontinent is infringing on individual and collective rights. It explores the ways and means that, by presenting minorities as threats and diversity rights as obstacles, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay are backtracking on efforts toward gender, reproductive and migrant rights, while state accountability is shrinking in cases involving institutional violence. Through the creation of internal enemies and employment of a rhetoric that pits minority rights against the greater good, access to fundamental liberties is increasingly being constrained for the more disadvantaged sectors of society.

The Growth of Social Inequality

Reforms in the workforce and healthcare

In the first months of 2019, 35.8% of the Argentine population was living below the poverty line. Inequality in pay distribution is at its highest point in the last decade, with the top 10% earning 21 times the salary of the bottom 10%.

Economic backdrop

The current crisis is the result of the economic decisions taken by President Mauricio Macri in order to correct the economic structural problems, as promised after his victory at the December 2015 elections. The new government’s plan bargained on a reprimarized production scheme and taking on external debt as a means to cover public spending. It placed finance at the core of its economic strategy, expecting foreign investors to flock to Argentina, a soon to be soaring market.

The opening of the country to global economy in the absence of protective measures for domestic industry proved to be detrimental, especially for small and medium size businesses. With a high inflation rate and skyrocketing bills for essential services such as water, gas and electricity, the local purchasing power plummeted. This context generated internal discontent and instability which further discouraged foreign investment.

To save the country’s flailing economy, President Macri approached the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a 50 billion dollar rescue package in 2018, the largest amount ever loaned by the institution. Pressed to reduce its spending by the IMF, Argentina imposed radical slashes in health care, pensions, social assistance programs and continued its cutbacks in labor rights. A few months later, a new currency crisis required the IMF loan to be extended to US$57.1 Billion with the government promising further cuts. Between March 2018 and 2019, the peso to dollar exchange rate rose 129%, year over year. The inflation reached 57% while foreign debt made up 86% of the GDP.

What the future holds for employment

The rise in unemployment, the deterioration of working conditions along with the contraction of consumption meant tougher social and economic conditions for the working and middle classes, while the better part of overall income has been channeled to the pockets of top earners. The new political and economic paradigm implies that workers’ rights should be sacrificed in the short term in order to preserve future employment.

As a result, self-employment began replacing traditional full time jobs. The public structures meant to oversee and monitor compliance with labor laws took a step back. In the quest for a national zero deficit, eleven national departments were eliminated, among which the Ministry of Employment which was demoted to the status of Secretariat. Finance Minister Alfonso Prat-Gay summarized the government’s position in the first days of his mandate by asking how much work unions were willing to give up in order to preserve jobs. By the same logic, the government imposed a cap inferior to inflation when salaries were to be renegotiated, giving rise to a protest which was violently repressed.

Labor unions were systematically persecuted and discredited, strikes and protest became increasingly violently repressed, making workers more vulnerable in a time of massive layoffs, suspensions and generally precarious conditions.

Impact on healthcare

The funding crisis of Argentina’s universal free health system is historical and it affects different jurisdictions in different ways. The reconfiguration proposed by the national government adds an extra level of difficulty. The situation is particularly alarming in the province of Buenos Aires, the most populated province in the country. Emergency rooms are overwhelmed because of lack of sufficient services in community level care. Underfunding, lay offs and understaffing generate longer waiting times while the absence of basic supplies in clinics is driving patients to hospitals. Long term hospitalizations are also in a critical state because of understaffing and scarce resources, jeopardizing patients’ well being, particularly in psychiatric hospitals.

According to the Fundación Soberanía Sanitaria, the 2019 budget of the Health Secretary, yet another demoted ministry, was 8% lower than the previous year, with a real reduction of 56% for the Program for Prevention and Control of Endemic Illnesses, 20% for national hospitals, a 78% cut in blood banks and 30% in transplants.

At the national level, the state also cut back on its traditional supplies such as vaccines, medication and contraceptives. Shots against meningitis are no longer mandatory for certain age groups due to cost and there’s been a shortage of medicine necessary in the treatment of chronic illnesses such as cancer and HIV.

In the past three years, and especially in the first half of 2019, the legal clinic coordinated by CELS and the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) has received 6 times more requests for counseling related to access to health care services, both public and private. Legal recourse seems to be the only resort for the many citizens unable to access guaranteed services. When the UBA-CELS clinic filed an appeal in the Buenos Aires province concerning a 5 year old’s prosthesis, it turned out that there were nearly 500 pending similar appeals against the public institution responsible.

Access to Habitat: Public Rules Tailored For the Private Sector

Analyzing the relationship between state and private interests in access to habitat

Land planning and use is a public responsibility. It is the state’s mandate to defend and protect individual, collective and community rights on territory against the private sector. However, because of the close ties existing between the private and public sectors in land development, access to habitat can no longer be guaranteed, due to several adverse factors, direct or indirect, such as the deterioration of the environment.

In this chapter, we analyze the specific cases of real estate developments in the Argentinean capital of Buenos Aires and suburbian Tigre –in the province of Buenos Aires– as well as the threats posed by the expanding agroindustry for small farmers and their land in the province of Mendoza. In all three cases, we observe administrative opacity, lack of public control, territorial prepotency on behalf of the private sector, state violence used in defense of private interests as well as human rights violations.

After it requested public information concerning the licensing and habilitation of many gated communities in the Greater Buenos Aires, CELS found that multiple neighborhoods’ permits are stalled by the provincial authority because of zoning violations. This came as no surprise as it is a known fact that, in the Buenos Aires province, half of the gated communities aren’t registered, hence not regulated as such. These luxury complexes pay the property taxes of rural parcels and evade plus value taxes and co-participation obligations with the public sector.

In the town of Tigre, some 30 km from Buenos Aires, 25% of the zoning plan was modified with one single ordinance in 2017 so as to adapt municipal rules to industry needs. In the Buenos Aires province, real estate developers fall under no specific regulation nor jurisdiction. The province may deny permits, but the authority to halt construction falls under the jurisdiction of the town of Tigre. Instead, Tigre chose to modify its zoning to fit the needs of luxury housing development.

In Buenos Aires, the capital city, similar mechanisms are allowing the transformation of a 700,000 square meter riverfront lot into a gated community. In November 2016, the Department of Urban Development and Transport signed an urban planning agreement with IRSA, the private owner of the lot purchased in 1998, allowing the real estate developer to build a private neighborhood, complete with a canal for the exclusive use of the future tenants –while the maintenance will be provided by the city of Buenos Aires. The irregularities are many, starting with the fact that urbanistic agreements are pacts between the public and private sectors to be used only for the higher public interest.

In Mendoza, the bureaucratic structure presents enough cracks and grey areas for loopholes to exist and to be used to the detriment of local communities. The Sarmiento family’s land sits on the border of the provinces of Mendoza and San Juan, it is where they grow their crops and herd their cattle. Over the past decades they’ve designed and developed an irrigation system to fight the structural lack of water. In 2011, agroindustry pundits Argenceres and Agropecuaria Elaia claimed the territory and started fencing the traditional land under the protection of local police.

The ongoing judicial battle opposes traditional farming communities to massive industrial production. It culminated when Pablo Sarmiento, son of the first legal owner of the lot, got shot in the leg by police in 2016 for resisting eviction. The policeman who shot the farmer had been hired by the private firms and the complaint filed against him was dismissed.

Changing For Worse

Public media during the Cambiemos party era

Within the first days of Mauricio Macri in the Casa Rosada, a policy shift by the new government on media regulation became very obvious. Two presidential orders repelled the existing law on audiovisual communication, eliminating an obstacle in the race towards privatization, concentration and public media downsizing.

By the third week in power of Cambiemos (Let’s Change), President Mauricio Macri had already created a Communications Ministry that absorbed the existing entities of media regulation, the Autoridad Federal de Servicios de Comunicación Audiovisual (AFCSA) and the Autoridad Federal de Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones (AFTIC). Through a series of executive orders, the independent organizations were placed under ministerial control, stripped of their influence, then dissolved and replaced by a bureau that would report to executive orders. Chief of cabinet Marcos Peña announced that “by decision of president Macri, the state war against journalism is over”.

During those days, the perspective on public media also changed drastically and a new executive order put the national broadcast media and news agency under its control with the newly created Sistema Federal de Medios y Contenidos Públicos (SFMCP). Pretexting the need to professionalize a supposedly underperforming public media, criticizing its partisan use by the previous government, a total overhaul of the public media was started. Indeed, the new era was one of dismantling, with four years of massive layoffs, budget cuts, a reduction in programming, the elimination of correspondent bureaus and an extreme reduction of federalism within the national services.

During 2016-2017, specialized public TV channels Encuentro, Paka Paka and DeporTV laid off 60% of their staff. The generalist Televisión Pública cut back news coverage by half, with its weekly grid of 30 hours reduced to 15 hours, until week end news bulletins were completely cancelled in 2018.

The national news agency Télam fired 40% of its workforce in 2018. A total of 354 journalists, producers, photographers, etc. were dismissed, most of them for ideological reasons. Two thirds of the laid off workers were affiliated to the unions that challenged the government’s cutbacks in public media. In this particular case, the pluralist and federal nature of the national media is profoundly impacted: 44 of the 75 regional correspondents were let go, leaving one single correspondent to take on the work of 12 colleagues and 5 provinces out of 24 were left with no local correspondent of the national news agency. The dismissals were contested in court, appealed by the government and the issue is now before the Supreme Court.

While one can observe the demise of the public media, privately owned media ventures have capitalized on the opportunities given by the promulgation of further executive orders: one to relax the limits set for media license ownership and the other concerning the merging of markets and allowing mobile communication companies to provide television content. The result of this is the creation of the biggest media holding in Latin America with the fusion of Cablevisión, Grupo Clarín and Telecom.

Secrecy

National security as rationale for an unchecked State

After the 2001 attacks on the United States, surveillance and secrecy became the guiding principles behind many state responses to so-called “new world threats.” The fights against terrorism, drug traffic, migration and organized crime moved to the center of the national security agenda. In addition to military strikes on other States, “hybrid” and transnational threats have also been invoked to justify more repressive deployment because these allegedly put the nation and its institutional order at stake. This State rationale and ideology of order – which pits supposed social peace against the chaos of conflict – give credence to an expansion of the security and intelligence apparatus. It is a model of State that compiles and uses an ever greater quantity of information, broadens its roles of repression, invades individual privacy, restricts democratic controls, and aims to justify all by invoking reasons of national security. It is a State that needs secrecy to function.

Over the past few years, the Argentine government has decided to adhere to this paradigm both in policy and ideological terms.1 The tipping points were Decree 683/2018, which modified the rules governing the National Defense Act and assigned some security tasks to the Armed Forces, and Decree 703/2018, the National Defense Policy Directive, which expressly defined defense guidelines. Since late 2015 until now, the government’s stance on security and defense has been centered on the “war on drugs and terrorism,” on establishing information exchange agreements in cooperation with other countries, on the purchase of arms and software, and on a notable increase in the intelligence budget.

Full Chapter in English here

War on Drug Trafficking, War on the Poor

Since it took office in December 2015, President Mauricio Macri’s administration has been imposing the narrative that the greatest plague on Argentinian soil is drug trafficking. Therefore it set the war against it at the center of the national security agenda.

In practical terms, almost four years into this policy, we can see that the war against drug trafficking resulted in the detention of thousands of individuals by security forces, mainly from impoverished neighborhoods and along borders. The number of drug related detentions increased significantly, leading to many unjustified incarcerations in an already dramatically overpopulated penitentiary system.

Although the “war against drugs” phenomenon is not specific to Argentina, here it resulted in the implementation of domestic war-like operations, justified by the inclusion of drug dealing in the list of national security threats. These policies are used by Macri’s Cambiemos party as a pillar of their communication campaign, and go as far as to present their war on drugs as a resounding victory, which it is not. A federal agent reported to CELS on condition of anonymity, “there’s no digging in the investigation. The only ones who get caught are the drug mules, the street corner pushers or the odd neighborhood dealer. But when you backtrack in the criminal structure, their suppliers are nowhere to be found.”

Truthfully, the indicators chosen here to evaluate the success of the anti-drug operation are discredited worldwide. The amounts seized, the soaring black market drug prices and the number of arrests in no way guarantee the eradication of drug trafficking. On the contrary, this agenda makes no distinction between drug lords, dealers and small pushers, nor does it distinguish between drug trafficking and drug use. This policy yielded multiple violations of human rights by the police and judicial apparatus, aimed particularly at the unprotected lower classes.

Security Minister Patricia Bullrich announced in October 2018 that federal forces had made 50,000 drug-related arrests between January 2016 and September 2018, a 145% increase compared to the previous triennium. She also admitted that 36% of those arrests led to an almost immediate release because the charges were possession for personal –not commercial– use. These numbers do not reflect the arrests made by provincial police forces.

The hard facts show that only 10% of drug-related cases actually lead to a trial. Security forces are not concerned with the validity of an arrest. They are required to arrest people on drug charges in order to inflate the statistics justifying the struggle against drug trade. A Buenos Aires prosecutor’s office studied drug related cases it received during one week in August 2018. It determined that 55% of said cases sprung from the exact same scenario: a random police stop-and-identification procedure on the street for “suspicious behaviour” followed by a search without warrant.

Socioeconomic indicators reveal that the majority of prisoners belong to the most vulnerable segments of society. A study conducted in 2017 shows that 61% of prisoners have not finished primary school and 85% do not hold a secondary diploma. 36% of men and 46% of women were unemployed at the time of their arrest. The same year, The Ministry of Justice and Human Rights recognized that 38% of prisoners are deprived of their liberty for drug related incidents.

To quote a judge of the Buenos Aires province, in most drug possession cases, trafficking is practiced as a source of income by people with very low economic status, “none of them become a millionaire.” It is the first cause of incarceration for women (43%) and for the trans population (70%).

Information available in Argentina and worldwide gives no proof of the efficiency of war against drug trafficking. However there are abundant recounts of how it leads to thousands of economically vulnerable persons being jailed for minor felonies in order to blow up statistics and reiterate the necessity for drug trafficking wars.

We conclude that it is imperative that a unified political decision be taken at national and provincial levels to end the police persecution of drug users. It is urgent that an alternative to deprivation of liberty be found for individuals involved in minor drug trade and who haven’t committed a violent crime. Also, police must urgently change their way of operating in poor neighborhoods to become an agent of protection rather than persecution and humiliation.

Locked Up and Left to Die

The use of police station cells as illegal prisons

On November 15th, 2018, a fire erupted in the police station of Esteban Echeverría, a suburban town in the Greater Buenos Aires. Although the station’s detention area had been repeatedly sealed off by administrative and court orders since 2000, there were 27 persons jailed there that day. In one of the cells, 12 cramped detainees were listening to music. When an official ordered them to turn it off, an argument broke out and police cut off power, triggering a protest in which mattresses were set ablaze. The fire spread rapidly, the highly flammable mattresses released toxic smoke. Four men died on the spot and 6 more perished in the following weeks from their injuries or from carbon monoxide poisoning. The reason why police and firefighters did not control the inferno in due time is still under investigation.

In the past two years, 17 persons lost their lives in similar circumstances in Buenos Aires province police stations.The tragedy newly exposed the disregard for the life of individuals deprived of freedom. Since 2005, prolonged detention in jail cells has been outlawed by the Supreme Court. Nonetheless, the practice persists, often in facilities that have been shut down. In parallel, the penitentiary system is overpopulated and collapsing.

The criminal policy that utilizes as primary tool deprivation of freedom is one of the most obvious causes of the growing inmate population. The saturation of penitentiary units is a direct consequence of it and accepting prison overpopulation appears as a political decision. This past June, the penitentiary service of the province of Buenos Aires (SPB) announced that it housed 48.210 detainees in facilities with a legal capacity of 28.810. Using police station cells for permanent detention is a historic practice in the Buenos Aires province which had declined after the 2005 Supreme Court sentence, but reemerged in 2014. The inmate population growth in the province of Buenos Aires was steadily around 6% until 2015. With the change of government, this trend has increased to a 9% annual growth average.

In June 2019, the Ministry of Security of the province of Buenos Aires informed that nearly 40% of its police stations’ detention facilities had been shut down by the judicial or administrative authorities. However those facilities were still in use, and at the time of the announcement, 1241 persons were being held in them illegally by police. In some cases, prisoners were sent by the Ministry of Security to jails that had previously been shut down by the same Ministry of Security.

First because of reinforced punitivism as a criminal policy and, then ,because of the lack of space in the proper facilities, detainees end up crammed in police stations, which are at 186% of their capacity.

In this chapter we asked ourselves what mechanisms allow the state to illegally jail individuals permanently in police stations and what are the consequences of the irregular detention conditions for the detainees and their families. And what we found is a bureaucratic loop that sustains the illegality.

In the case of the Esteban Echeverría jail, a habeas corpus had been presented by a detainee’s relative requesting he be removed from the unsafe facility. The judge notified the police chief to comply with the closure order of the facility and have the prisoners transferred. The police chief transmitted this order up to his hierarchical authority in the Ministry of Security, asking that the detainees be moved out. That authority denied the request claiming lack of space in other stations and that long term detention issues should be dealt with at the level of the penitentiary service of the Province of Buenos Aires, which reports to the Ministry of Justice.

The public servants responsible for the provincial detention system recognize the structural collapse at play in the overpopulation crisis. However, instead of generating solution-oriented policies, they use the structural problems as a justification to maintain the status quo.

The consequences of prolonged detention in illegal conditions play out at many levels but fall mainly on the prisoners and their families. Additionally to failing to reach the minimum health and security requirements, these informal conditions offer no legal recognition of prisoners’ rights, among which visiting rights. In this context, inmates are further submitted to the arbitrary rule of the police. Recounts of jailors using inmates’ needs and suffering as bargaining chips for their own benefit are plentiful.

The lack of regulation in cases of prolonged incarcerations in a police station enables the arbitrary rule of despotism as police officers are free to make and break their own rules in what they regard as their fiefdom, adding yet more levels of massive tights violation.

Maximum Operation, Minimum Responsibility

Obstacles in monitoring the consequences of police operations

Over the past few years, many judicial investigations on police operations were dropped without yielding any information on the violence that caused reported casualties. The manipulation or dismissal of investigations by prosecutors and judges deprives society from the factual explanation democracies deserve. Under those circumstances, journalists’ speculations and police recounts –which notably echo in the government’s official version of events since December 2015– become the only information available.

The case of the disappearance of Santiago Maldonado is not an isolated example, but it did attract a lot of attention both in Argentina and abroad. Locally, hundreds of thousands took to the streets during the months he went missing. Protesters demanded a proper investigation be held and that the young man, last seen during a repressive police raid in Patagonia on August 1st 2017, be returned safe and sound. During most of the 78 days of his disappearance, his whereabouts and the context of his vanishing made the headlines. After they had first questioned Maldonado’s presence during the crackdown on the Mapuche protest on indigenous land, the forces of the Gendarmería Nacional Argentina (GNA) denied any involvement in his disapperancence.

Santiago Maldonado’s body was eventually found floating a few meters away from where he had last been seen. The autopsy concluded that he had died of asphyxiation by drowning and that his corpse showed no signs of brutality. The Maldonado family stressed that Santiago didn’t know how to swim, suggesting that he wouldn’t have ventured out to the freezing river out of his own will.

On November 28, 2018, the federal judge in charge of the investigation closed the case and dropped the charges against the only policeman accused. The sole judicial path to collecting facts on what had occurred on the morning of August 1st, 2017 –and the only legal means to hold the GNA accountable– had been truncated. In September this year, with the Maldonado family acting as plaintiffs, the Appeal Court overturned the sentence and ordered the investigation be reopened.

Upon analysis of a series of violent police operations, we’ve identified key obstacles to investigating the forces’ operations.

1. Direct or indirect judicial endorsement of police violence

As a rule, when asked to investigate vast police operations, the judicial system tends to legitimize violent forms of intervention. It can do so in a number of ways, namely by exonerating suspects of criminal charges, or by condemning specific individuals without questioning the operation itself nor its commanders. In the Maldonado case, federal judge Lleral dismissed the GNA official on the grounds that Maldonado had perished in a “fatidic moment of solitude” when there were more than 50 policemen on site in the context of an organized repression. The judicial system did not analyze the chain of command, nor did it sanction the GNA for obstructing the investigation in the days following the repression.

The bigger the operation, the more forces participate and the more difficult it becomes to investigate. It is in these complex scenarios that the use of violence is most common. Experience indicates that the mandatory police filmings of massive operations tend to disappear as arbitrarily as the arrests that they show. The solidarity shown between forces to resist providing documents and evidence which could be used in the investigation against them is met by the relative indifference of the judicial system. In such a context, the investigation often relies on the victims and their families as plaintiffs who engage the legal procedures that the judicial system is unwilling to activate. In short, the state is reluctant to investigate itself.

The judicial system is also guilty of passive endorsement by not defining clearly in its court orders the limits of force to be used by police in the operations it oversees, letting the police enjoy a potentially risky discretionary latitude . The absence of weapon control and police identification also make it difficult to trace events even though, by law, federal and Buenos Aires city police must bear uniform and identification.

2. Institutional cover ups and weak disciplinary measures

The Police, as a force, is as accountable for the deaths and casualties resulting from its members’ actions, as are the members themselves. The provincial and federal departments of Security are expected to hold internal investigations when they suspect there was improper use of force by one of their officials. However, these internal investigations seldom follow through.

A widely used strategy to avoid the verdict of an internal inquiry is subordinating it to the judicial investigation, in which police already interferes by not providing the requested information. This loop is in fact an institutional cover up that proves effective in stalling inquiries.

3. The intrusion of the executive power

The head of the Department of Security, Patricia Bullrich ,plays an active role in defending members of the forces who are being investigated and replicates the forces’ version of events in the media, guaranteeing information that has yet to be confirmed by autopsies and other expertises. The President of Argentina Mauricio Macri personally congratulated Luis Chocobar, an off duty policeman who shot a fleeing criminal dead in the back. Chocobar was still under investigation when Macri summoned him to the Casa Rosada.

4. Lack of public knowledge of the norms that regulate and limit police action

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights affirms that the absence of a clearly defined legal frame, duly publicitized within the population, to serve as a base in police education and training, favours the discretionary power of the state agents.

There is a normative deficit specific to police’s use of force, regulation systems and obligations. The rules are mostly dispersed in internal rule books, ministerial resolutions and orders that remain within the security forces’ scope. The forces therefore become their own guardians.

A deliberate confusion can also be found in officials’ narrative and decisions, as seen with head of Security Patricia Bullrich’s announcement of an “anti-protest protocol” in 2016. This protocol was invoked to justify police forcefully li. Said protocol never acquired normative status for infringing on existing laws.

Investigating violent police operations shows severe difficulties in avoiding impunity. The resistance and incapacity of the judicial system to reconstruct and analyze operations as a whole as well as each individual’s involvement is the result of a combination of factors: political and ideological resistance, limited investigation capacity, bureaucratic inertia, faulty regulations, failures in planning and carrying out operations as well as non compliance with the rules of identification and records.

Movements: The Fights For Human Rights in Democracy

Argentina has a long and rich history of human rights activism. The last dictatorship (1976-1983) generated a movement initiated principally by relatives of “the disappeared”, who regrouped into associations such as Madres de Plaza de mayo, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, Familiares de Desaparecidos Y Detenidos por Razones Políticas (Relatives of the Disappeared and Victims of Detention for Political Reasons) and Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS). Along with a few other pre-existing organisms –the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights (APDH), SERPAJ, the Argentine League for Human Rights and the MEDH– these 8 organizations played a determining role in the early political and legal challenge of state terrorism from reason of humans rights.

In its beginnings, fighting government impunity for the crimes committed during state terrorism was at the core of the struggle. Over the decades, this movement branched out and got involved in defending human rights in a broader sense. As the panorama changed, the founding organizations also joined forces with other associations from different backgrounds, institutions and structures. This chapter is a reflection on the current state and expansion of human rights struggles in democracy.

The diversity of strategies and connections within the movement reflects the diversity among the concerned relatives themselves as well as the multiplicity of agents who engaged in the fight, from the fields of activism, labor rights, Law, Mental health, Forensics, Humanities, etc. It allowed for a repertoire of tools and strategies that proved effective and remained for future struggles.

1. The wide field of those who engage in struggling for their rights

After the 1983 elections and the return to democracy, the government of the new president, Raul Alfonsin, once the vice-president of APDH, starts paving the way to giving answers about the violations of the de facto era. The state creates the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) and the military collaborate by proposing to put top ranking officials on trial. For the first time, human rights become a priority of the state and no longer only of organizations. “Starting in 1985, the human rights movement ceases to be the cause of the same 8 organizations and is embraced by large sectors of society. Commissions and secretaries on human rights made their appearance in labor unions, political parties, social institutions, legislatures, town halls and student associations”, analyzed Emilio Mignone, first president of CELS.

The constitutional reform of 1994 integrated the hierarchy of international treaties. This enabled many new sectors to adhere to the human rights strategy and actors such as peasants, migrants, indigenous communities and health care system users join in the movement.

2. A multisectorial field around police violence and democratic security

At the term of the Dirty War, deaths resulting from police violence were rarely registered as such and the human rights movement was tensioned. Existing organizations of disappeared relatives were reluctant to associate their loved ones, persecuted because of their militancy, to these new victims of state violence who were generally youths accused of committing a crime.

CELS began dealing with its first cases on institutional violence in the democracy era in the mid-1980’s. Lawyer and ex-juvenile court judge Alicia Oliveira convinced Mignone to open the doors of litigation to other types of state violence: deaths occurred during a confrontation with police and victims of police raids repeatedly arrested for background checks or edicts (the now obsolete moral code enforced by police).

This line of work demanded CELS and other organizations weave new alliances with student associations, the underprivileged villero movements, LGBT+ movements, among others. In 1991, the death of youth Walter Bulacio during a police raid resonated with students, teachers, journalists and lawmakers. This movement became a political actor when the Bulacio family’s lawyers presented themselves a few days later as Correpi, an acronym for coordinador against police and institutional repression, still active today. One of the strategies of these associations lies in the partnerships they create. Correpi represented the Bulacio family in Argentine court rooms, while CELS took the case to the Inter-American System.

At this stage in the development of human rights associations, the concept of rights broadens and the actors and alliances multiply. Some groups started investigating the patterns at play in police abuse in the 90s and 2000’s, creating the new approach of democratic security in which the police is a force of protection. This position, brutally opposed to the traditional anti-repression movement, aims to reform structures and is a first step towards the active participation of the executive and judicial powers in promoting human rights from within.

In 2003, the government of Nestor Kirchner includes human rights activists in its administration, institutionalizing a transversal agenda on human rights in various state organizations. In 2012, a national campaign against institutional violence was proposed from within Congress.

3. Alliances with the workers’ movement: unions and social organizations

At first, many thought that the human rights movement would replace the workers’ rights movements. However unions played a fundamental part in the 1990’s in the struggle against growing poverty. The combination of the 20th anniversary of the military coup and the deteriorating economic and work conditions in the midst of Argentina’s most neoliberal decade fueled protest from a human rights perspective. The unions stressed that many victims of the dictatorship were indeed workers, in the sense that the persecution they suffered was rooted in their work activity and, often, in their involvement in the unions. It’s during this decade that Argentina begins to discuss the likely participation of civilians in several war crimes, those occurred on work premisses, a stepping stone of the human rights trials against civilians and businesses.

CTA, a major labor union, was born in the 90’s. its referential figure Victor De Genaro had been a member of SERPAJ and APDH and human rights were part of the union since the moment of its foundation.

The early 2000’s were marked by a devastating economic and political crisis and for the first time, the human rights agenda was overtaken by the emergency of poverty. New challenges called for different protagonists, and social protest became the point of convergence for all. The episodes of extreme police brutality that marked the protests of December 19 and 20, 2001 unveiled the dimension of repression in contexts of social protest and the need to regulate it.

In the years following Argentina’s default, yet another new political figure arose in the presence of social organizations. Their demands expressed the priorities of the most needy and, articulated with human rights’ movements, became a potent force that asked for access to land and habitat, regulation of police operations, for instance, and obtained institutional policies such as universal allowance per child and recognition of self-employment in marginalized professions. The social organizations linked to these achievements are still today key actors in negotiating with the government.

4. Woman, lesbian, gay, bisexual, travesti and transgender movement

Feminism became much more massive and visible in Argentina with the Ni Una Menos movement, not one woman less, which demanded that the state take action regarding gender violence and femicide.

Argentine human rights and gender violence had already crossed paths abroad during the dictatorship when a group of exiled Argentine and Chilean women achieved the Copenhagen Forum speak of the situation of their countries and invite Élida Galleti and Renée Epelbaum, two Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.

With the return to democracy, women movements and feminists returned to the streets and resumed the activism halted by the seven years of the de facto regime, namely the first campaign to legalize abortions, launched in 1975 “Basta de Abortos Clandestinos”, Stop Clandestine Abortions.

In the 1980’s as well, the Comunidad Homosexual Argentina (CHA) starts formulating its demands from a human rights perspective, demanding the state guarantee diversity as a right. Police raids intensified and CHA approached human rights organizations for the work they were conducting on institutional violence and arbitrary arrests.

Some Mothers of Plaza de Mayo embraced the movement and Nora Cortiñas, Renée Epelbaum among others marched in the 2nd Gay Pride in 1993 because they understood that their presence acted as a protective shield and because they understood that “the homosexual community”, as all non heterosexuals were called back then, had also been persecuted by the regime.

Women activists played an important role in protests and in the transformation of bankrupt factories into cooperatives after the 2001-2002 crisis. In the context of ongoing protest, travesti and transgender collectives set the social and institutional violence that marks their daily live sin the political agenda. They approached human rights organizations particularly about the police edicts, the legal justification for the ongoing raids on homosexuals, trans, travestis and sex workers.

In the National Women’s Encounter of 2003 in Rosario, Catholics For the Right to Decide, a pro-choice confessional association of women, presented the green headscarf for legal abortion, a direct reference to the Madres de Plaza de Mayo’s emblematic white headscarf as a tribute to their struggle. In 2005, the National Campaign For Legal Safe and Free Abortion is officially launched by 70 organizations with the slogan “Sex education to decide. Contraceptives to prevent abortion. Legal abortion to prevent dying”. Today the Campaign counts more than 500 member associations.