At the beginning of the 1990s, in academic as well as political circles, it was agreed that Latin America, having closed a cycle of dictatorships and social revolutions, had entered a new period—perhaps a long and sustained one—of “democratic consolidation.” Within this still-uncertain transition, human rights movements long identified with the denunciation of violations and the defense of victims of the dictatorships have had to rethink their objectives, methods and perspectives. The debate over this rethinking, though never systematic, has gradually been growing.[1]
On one side are those who insist on remaining loyal to the recent history of the human rights movement, prioritizing the denunciation of human rights violations and the impunity which has unfortunately been an element in most of the democratic transitions. On the other side are those who propose the need to adopt a new agenda which would include an activist commitment to shaping the very process of transition—guaranteeing and struggling for a much broader spectrum of rights.
In this article I will argue for a third perspective—one that tries to move beyond the dichotomy between those who maintain the need to focus on traditional notions of human rights work and those who argue in favor of reorienting the human rights agenda toward issues of democratic institutionality and governability. Instead, this third perspective promotes the idea of a “culture of rights” as a way of linking traditional notions of civil and political rights with social, economic and cultural rights. It also promotes the notion that rights are intimately linked to the idea of “quality of life,” as developed by Amartya Sen and others.[2] Sen critiques utilitarian models of “well-being,” distinguishing between welfare policies as restricted constructions of well-being, versus well-being in a broader sense, since quality of life can only be measured by evaluating the quality and range of things an individual can do or become during his or her life. This includes the freedom of action a person effectively has to choose among options. Developing the idea of a “culture of rights” in the Latin American context requires a reconsideration of the doctrine of human rights and a brief review of the historical processes through which the notion of rights were built—and destroyed—in Latin America.
For obvious reasons, in the countries which have lived under openly dictatorial regimes, like Brazil or those in the Southern Cone and Central America, or sui generis repressive or authoritarian regimes like Mexico, Peru and Colombia, human rights activists have focused on the defense of civil and political rights. While these activists have made explicit reference to certain social and economic rights negated by elites, like the rights to land or the right to strike, it was understood that the struggle for the defense and promotion of these rights was the domain of particular social groups, such as peasant organizations, trade unions and political parties.
The emergence of repressive dictatorships—usually a reactionary effort to block the growing demands and mobilization of anti-oligarchic social and political movements—worked against the formulation of a political discourse based on a universal definition of human rights. Yet throughout Latin America since the end of the nineteenth century, social and political movements have won and defended certain specific economic and social rights. In the first decades of the century, for example, labor rights were won in the more developed countries of the region as well as in some less developed countries like Peru. The right to free education was also won in these countries, expressed in the democratizing demands of the struggles over university reform as well as in the campaigns against illiteracy. In the second half of the century, demands for the right to land, anticipated a generation earlier by the Mexican Revolution, began to appear in agrarian reform legislation and generated social and cultural movements—indigenismo, for example—throughout the continent. This accumulation of movements defending specific as opposed to universal rights gave a distinct form to the history of human rights in Latin America.
The first notion of human rights was formulated in the framework of the struggle against the European absolutisms on the basis of individualist conceptions of liberalism. Its stellar moment was the period of the great revolutions of the eighteenth century: the U.S. and French Revolutions, each accompanied by a universal declarations of rights. It is important to remember that since these initial formulations, it has been clear that the most elemental citizen rights went together with the exercise of certain minimal economic rights. That is the sense of the classical liberal linkage of property and citizenship. So while it is common to present the history of human rights as one of a succession of “generations” of such rights—first the civil rights of the seventeenth century, then the political rights of the eighteenth century and later the economic and social rights of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the distinction is deceiving.[3] History has frequently inverted this scheme—in Latin America, as we have seen, and in some European countries like Germany, many social rights appeared before political rights. In addition, one can argue that these different “generations” of rights are in fact indivisibly linked to one another.
In Latin America’s nineteenth-century pseudo-liberal, aristocratic republics, economic and social rights—precarious and restricted to be sure—arrived before political rights. In this period, the idea emerged that the poor were entitled to a certain degree of social protection from the state. It was through the fight for these rights to protection that servants on the haciendas, slaves on the plantations, semi-salaried workers and members of artisan guilds all discovered the importance of citizenship. This link between social rights and citizenship made its first appearance in the Mexican Revolution. The Revolution would have been little more than the reconstitution of oligarchic power had the slogan “No Re-election” not been accompanied by the added demand, “Land and Liberty.” With that slogan, the Revolution ushered in a new understanding of universal rights. The Revolutionary Constitution of 1917 was the first in the world to recognize economic, social and cultural rights on the same level as the traditional civil and political rights.
This experience of the indivisible nature of human rights, however, was truncated. The Latin American republics throughout this century have, for the most part, remained anchored to a liberal and individualistic vision of rights, all the while restricting them in practice. With this restriction of rights, the idea of citizenship became, for many, an unattainable fantasy. In this context, the authoritarian dictatorships, drawing on old corporate and paternalist traditions, presented themselves as alternatives to a rights-based democracy, not simply for reasons of order but also in relation to many social demands of their populations. The authoritarian populisms of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, Juan Perón in Argentina, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in Colombia and Juan Velasco in Peru all legitimated themselves along the lines of the disjuncture between democracy and welfare. “You can’t eat democracy”—a phrase coined in the early 1950s by the Peruvian dictator Manuel Odría—aptly captures this idea.
Oscillating between restricted versions of individualist liberalism and authoritarian populism, in most Latin American countries we continue to find a significant deficit in the protection of rights. We also find a deficit in the awareness of rights—and especially in the understanding of rights as interrelated and universal. For broad sectors of Latin Americans, rights are not only tenuous but “particular,” the property of some but not all, achievements that must be jealously guarded by specific groups. This way of understanding rights was later exploited by neoliberal reformers. In a variety of ways and at different historical moments, their arguments have been advanced in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile and Mexico, countries whose systems of social rights mask the underlying prevalence of corporate guild traits and create particular privileges aimed at blocking progress and social mobility. These particular privileges, it was argued, are barriers to modernization and brakes on increasing productivity. And worse, they create the illusion that social rights, in addition to unnecessarily taxing the economy, inherently lead to inefficiency and bureaucratic red tape.
Converting that illusion into a diagnosis, neoliberal reformers throughout the region have implemented legal and constitutional reforms that systematically attacked existing systems for the protection of social and economic rights. Certain rights have not only been restricted but eliminated altogether. In Peru, for example, the right to housing, previously recognized in the 1979 Constitution, does not appear in the 1993 version. While in some instances, such as the 1989 Caracazo in Venezuela, people protested the rolling back of social and economic rights, in other cases resistance has been more muted. This can be explained by the unraveling of the social fabric during the radical economic adjustment of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which opened the way to an individualist logic of survival. All this coincided with a new liberal ethical discourse and a new conventional wisdom—centered on individual survival—promoted from the center of the culture of globalization.
Far from modernizing, the deregulating and deprotectionist wave has seriously undermined the opportunity for millions of men and women to reach a much hoped-for modernity. The absence of social rights has affected all strata of the population. It has placed some on the brink of extermination; it has driven others to an uncertainty that has encouraged speculative and parasitic behavior. As social rights have been chipped away, they have been replaced by clientelistic structures, such as social investment funds created to “alleviate poverty” with funding from the World Bank and other multilateral sources. An extreme lack of protection provides no incentive for risk and innovation. It kills creative potential, causing people to take refuge in the atavistic as their only security. It is not strange, then, that today we speak of neopopulism to refer to governments like those of Carlos Salinas in Mexico, Carlos Menem in Argentina and Alberto Fujimori in Peru—governments which have paradoxically been touted as the cutting edge of modernizing, neoliberal reform.[4] If the human rights movement has a principal strategic challenge, it is to cut the Gordian knot of this paradox.
At first glance, it might seem that those struggling for the defense and promotion of human rights should prioritize the juridical and political arenas. Yet the struggle for human rights must take place on multiple levels and terrains. Above all, an effective defense of human rights rests upon strong ethical and cultural foundations. These foundations have been eroded by years of repressive government and neoliberal social and economic policies. As a result, it is crucial to prioritize the reconstruction of rights and a culture of rights which demands, in the words of Peruvian economist Javier Iguiñiz, that we reverse our attitudes of “cynical pessimism and irresponsible complacence” by promoting “less fatalism and more indignation.”[5] This notion of a culture of rights has been taken up as a key objective by the Latin American human rights community.
To promote a culture of rights requires rethinking the relation between contemporary proposals and historical traditions. While there exists a broad consensus in Latin America as to the preeminence of communitarian over individualist traditions, as well as of social over political citizenship, human rights strategies often reproduce patterns inspired by traditions that arose elsewhere.[6] Thus, the usual approach to the theme of rights assumes a liberal and individualist vision whose cultural legitimacy is limited in most Latin American societies. As we have argued, the basic intuitions of modern ethics—equality, liberty, rights—have been constructed in Latin America on the terrain of social demands and struggles. To cut through this contradiction, we must establish a vision in which economic and social life are interlinked with the principle of human dignity. And rights must consist not only of limits on state power, but also of a broad set of institutions that guarantee human existence—or “human security”—in the economic, nutritional, personal, communal, environmental and political spheres.[7] What this is all about, finally, is that rights must become universalized and institutionalized.
In the human rights discourse there is a word which is reiterated, often as a not-yet-obtained ideal: “accountability.” Normally this is understood as an ability of individuals to demand that the state comply with some obligation, or respect a certain right. Accountability requires monitoring, which in turn requires a certain set of standards and indicators. In relation to civil and political rights, such standards and indicators have developed over time—the UN Declaration on Human Rights, the Covenant against Torture, and so on. When it comes to social, economic and cultural rights, the work—though it has a long history—is still in progress. In many countries of the region, we have advanced to the point where systematic reports are being produced in regard to the status of these rights. And on a global scale, of course, we have the unenforceable rights enshrined in the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
Monitoring social rights might seem coterminous with monitoring social policy, but this is not the case. From a perspective that gives priority to a subjective dimension of rights, one cannot equate the enforcement of rights with a collection of legal entitlements—important as these are—placed at the disposal of citizens. Measuring the enforcement of rights by adding up social expenditures and the quantity of goods and services available in a determined area of social life—education, health or housing, for example—fails to capture the crucial question of the status of the dignity and autonomy of the citizenry.[8]
From a rights perspective, there is a need to radically critique many of the social policies which have expanded throughout the continent recently as instruments to legitimize pseudo-democracies like Peru. These policies have replaced the notion of universality with that of “targeted investment.” The word “investment” stresses that social spending serves to strengthen an economic factor—”human capital”—which, like all capital, must offer a return on investment. The word “targeted” stresses that the spending is limited to certain segments of the population: the very poorest. Any other destination of social spending is placed in question. Thus, a program which at first glance appears just and reasonable in the context of extreme poverty and scarce resources, in reality springs from a distorted vision of the “social.” It assumes that society is simply a collection of individuals left to fend for themselves, who feel obligated to assume “social” responsibility only in exceptional cases. But the “social” is more than a collection of individuals; it has demands and a dynamic of its own.
As Javier Iguiñiz has suggested, the idea of a “culture of rights” promotes the construction of societies in which the intrinsic dignity of human beings is recognized, along with a notion of justice that tolerates neither impunity nor the extremes of inequality and exclusion in which most Latin Americans now live.[9] In this way, a culture of rights perspective confronts authoritarian conceptions of the state and society, as well as perspectives that reduce society to the market and interpersonal relations to contracts meant only to guarantee private benefit. Constructing this culture of rights is the multifaceted challenge that the Latin American human rights movement must face in the coming years.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eduardo Cáceres is a sociologist and directs the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights program of the Asociación Pro-Derechos Humanos (APRODEH), a nonprofit organization dedicated to human rights defense and promotion based in Lima, Peru. Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
NOTES
1. Among other institutional settings, this debate has been promoted by and carried out under the auspices of the Instituto Latinoamericano de Servicios Legales Alternativos (ILSA) of Bogotá, Colombia. National research and seminar procedings appear in various publications of the Institute. See, for example, El Otro Derecho, No. 17, ILSA (1996).
2. See Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, eds., The Quality of Life (London: Oxford University Press/The United Nations University, 1993).
3. The fundamental text is T.H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Class (New York: Doubleday, 1963). For a critique of the idea of
“generations of rights” see Asbjorn Eide, Catarina Krause and Allan Rosas, eds., Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995).
4. While the use of the term “neopopulism” is questionable, it refers to “a regime and a style of doing politics in which the relationship of the leader to the masses does not involve the mediation of autonomous institutions.” See Aldo Panfichi and Cynthia Sanborn, “Democracia y neopopulismo en el Perú contemporáneo,” Márgenes, V. 8, No. 13/14 (November 1995), p. 45.
5. Javier Iguiñiz, Desigualdad y pobreza en el mundo (Lima: Centro de Estudios Peruanos, 1999), pp. 84 and 110.
6. For the Peruvian case, see Sinesio López, Ciudadanos reales e imaginarios (Lima: Instituto Diálogo y Propuesta, 1997).
7. From the beginning of modern philosophy the right to security was considered a human right. Locke, for example, mentions this right together with the right to freedom and to property. In recent decades, most notably in UN documents, the concept of security has been broadened to include the aspects mentioned. It could be said that the “negative view” of security, restricted to protection in the face of external aggression, is being transformed into a more “positive” view of human security.
8. This idea draws on the work of the noted economist Amartya Sen. A Spanish-language anthology of his work, published in English between 1985 and 1995, is Amartya Sen, Bienestar, justicia y mercado (Barcelona: Paidos, 1997).
9. Iguiñiz, Desigualdad y pobreza en el mundo , p. 112.
