Abstract, Low-Intensity Democracy and Peru’s Neoliberal State: The Case of the Humala Administration

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Low-Intensity Democracy and Peru’s Neoliberal State: The Case of the Humala Administration
by William Aviles and Yolima Rey Rosas   

The election of Ollanta Humala in 2011 did not lead to a radical break from neoliberalism as many expected. His administration continued and deepened Peru’s conservative political and economic regime, its “low-intensity democracy.” His lack of a shift has been attributed to electoral dynamics, his leadership style, and the weakness of political parties. However, these readings overlook the structural impediments to any left government in Peru and Humala’s readiness to adapt his politics to this neoliberal reality. The power of Peru’s neoliberal political elite, the United States, economic groups, and transnational capital have all helped to constitute a structure of elite rule strong enough to prevent a radical shift.

Abstract, The Araguaia Guerrilla War (1972–1974): Armed Resistance to the Brazilian Dictatorship

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The Araguaia Guerrilla War (1972–1974): Armed Resistance to the Brazilian Dictatorship
by Janaína de Almeida Teles    

The Araguaia guerrilla war (1972–1974) was an attempt to reconcile armed struggle and political awareness that became a sort of “guerrilla focus” with roots in the peasant population, which assumed a decisive role in the resistance to military repression. This period was characterized by the centralization of operations of information and repression, consolidating the tactic of “political disappearance” in Brazil. The military occupation terrorized the population to mitigate any multiplier effect of the insurgency, and its success reverberated throughout the continent. At the same time, denunciations of its human rights abuses helped to erode the dictatorship.

Abstract, Economic Extractivism and Agrarian Social Movements: Perspectives on Low-Intensity Democracy in the Face of the Colombian Conflict

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Economic Extractivism and Agrarian Social Movements: Perspectives on Low-Intensity Democracy in the Face of the Colombian Conflict
by Leila Celis

During the mid-1980s, Colombia joined the neoliberal global economy in two ways: (1) by implementing a “low-intensity democracy” made up of reforms intended to institutionalize the social protests as a response to the crisis of governance and to promote investor security and (2) by exchanging a protectionist industrialization economic model for an extractivist neoliberal one. The new progressive legislation created inclusive institutions and recognized multiculturalism and social and political rights, but these very rights are denied by the neoliberal economy, which favors big transnational capital and the physical and legal coercion that this model requires. These two pivotal elements of neoliberalism (governance and the economy) are pragmatically incompatible. The dominant class has favored the interests of powerful transnational elites and employed both legal and military avenues. Consequently, 30 years later, the social movements have been only partially and temporarily institutionalized. Active rejection of the economic model is growing. Social organizations have appropriated the concept of human rights and adapted it to their social project, the construction of a peasant economy that opposes the neoliberal one.

Abstracts, Resisting Neoliberalism in Colombia: The Role of Human Rights

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Resisting Neoliberalism in Colombia: The Role of Human Rights
by Paul A. Chambers

The Colombian government’s noncompliance with the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement’s Labor Action Plan calls into question not only the government’s intentions but also the efficacy of human rights activism and discourse for social resistance to neoliberalism. Colombia has managed to adjust the narrative on human rights and improve its international image, paving the way for U.S. ratification of the free-trade agreement despite the fact that the human rights situation continues to be very serious. Its success in this is due to the way in which the debate on the agreement and human rights was framed—with a very narrow focus on trade unionists’ rights and a discourse that did not link civil and political rights to economic and social rights—and to the ideological affinity between neoliberalism and the dominant liberal discourse on human rights.

Abstract, Making Absence Visible: The Caravan of Central American Mothers in Search of Disappeared Migrants

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Making Absence Visible: The Caravan of Central American Mothers in Search of Disappeared Migrants
by Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández

The touring model employed by the Caravan of Central American Mothers in search of disappeared migrants in transit through Mexico creates processes of political empowerment for poor, indigenous peasant women who have no previous experience as activists and human rights defenders. Interviews and participant observation with members and organizers of the ninth caravan (held in December 2013) reveal three key moments that anchor the mothers’ transformation into political subjects and human rights activists: the creation of a collective identity based on maternal activism, the forging of an alliance with transnational human rights networks, and the emergence of a budding politics of visibility based on public acts of grieving that candidly lament the vulnerability of migrants caught in the drug war and border securitization across the hemisphere.

Abstract, Coercive Inclusion in the Mexican War on Drugs: A Field Study of Human Rights and the State in Michoacán

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Coercive Inclusion in the Mexican War on Drugs: A Field Study of Human Rights and the State in Michoacán
by Philipp Wolfesberger

Qualitative ethnographic study of the human rights violations committed in the course of the militarized combat against drug trafficking organizations in rural Michoacán unmasks state practices of coercive inclusion. The violation of human rights and the subsequent processing of human rights claims paradoxically bind the marginalized population to the formal state and foster its subordination. The practical configuration of the current arena of human rights is not the lever for a democratic, inclusive Mexico but a curtain that conceals the repressive practices that it makes possible. In the processing of human rights complaints, the legal rights of physical integrity and private property become moral rights with no effect of legal justice.

Abstract, The Guatemalan Campesino Movement and the Postconflict Neoliberal State

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The Guatemalan Campesino Movement and the Postconflict Neoliberal State

by Simon Granovsky-Larsen   

The Guatemalan peace process helped to shape both the form of state that emerged following armed conflict and the constraints and opportunities faced by contemporary social movements. Despite the reconfiguration of power by Guatemalan elites through peace negotiation and accord-based reforms, social movements have harnessed neoliberal projects to strengthen grassroots resistance and alternative-building. An overview of the campesino movement and the case of the Comité Campesino del Altiplano indicates that campesinos have engaged strategically with neoliberal resources in order to construct counterhegemonic projects.

Abstract, The Guatemalan Campesino Movement and the Postconflict Neoliberal State

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The Guatemalan Campesino Movement and the Postconflict Neoliberal State

by Simon Granovsky-Larsen   

The Guatemalan peace process helped to shape both the form of state that emerged following armed conflict and the constraints and opportunities faced by contemporary social movements. Despite the reconfiguration of power by Guatemalan elites through peace negotiation and accord-based reforms, social movements have harnessed neoliberal projects to strengthen grassroots resistance and alternative-building. An overview of the campesino movement and the case of the Comité Campesino del Altiplano indicates that campesinos have engaged strategically with neoliberal resources in order to construct counterhegemonic projects.

Abstract, The Political Impact of Chilean New Song in Exile

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The Political Impact of Chilean New Song in Exile
by J. Patrice McSherry    

The musical movement known as Chilean New Song became a key mobilizing force in politics in the 1960s and early 1970s in Chile, inspiring, uniting, and motivating people in a common cause and articulating the dreams and hopes of masses of people for progressive social change. Similarly, the New Song movement in exile, after the 1973 coup, helped to generate and sustain the support and solidarity of Chilean exiles and foreign nationals around the world, speaking about the repression in Chile, communicating the ideals of the popular movements, and inspiring and strengthening solidarity movements in many countries.

Introduction, Democracy, Repression, and the Defense of Human Rights

:::::: Intro ::::::

Democracy, Repression, and the Defense of Human Rights
by William Avilés and Leila Celis                                    


In the 1990s Barry Gills, Joel Rocamora, and Richard Wilson (1993) directly challenged the democratic-transitions literature through critical assessments of the relatively young democracies in Latin America and the developing world. They introduced the model of “low-intensity democracy” as a more precise classification of the limits of democratic change in the developing world after the cold war. A low-intensity democracy is a largely procedural democracy that allows political opposition, greater individual freedoms, a reduced institutional role for the armed forces, and a more permeable environment for the investments of transnational capital. Greatly expanding on this idea, William Robinson (1996) posited that, given the instability that authoritarian regimes of the past had engendered in the populace, these elite democracies were essential to the global integration of these economies. Democratization movements seeking radical change beyond formal electoral competition were pushed aside by the more conservative leaders of antiauthoritarian movements. These leaders were financed and advised by U.S. foreign policy makers, who presented them as paragons of democracy in an emerging global capitalist age. They represented economic and political factions pursuing the integration of their respective economies into capitalist globalization and fully prepared to turn to state and para-state repression of groups that challenged the state outside of the formal democratic institutions.

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Democracy, Repression, and the Defense of Human Rights 

by William Avilés and Leila Celis

Tomas Ocampo, Outreach Coordinator for Latin American Perspectives, interviews issue editors William Avilés and Leila Celis on: Democracy, Repression, and the Defense of Human Rights published in September 2017.

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Our Latest Issue! Democracy, Repression, and the Defense of Human Rights

Democracy, Repression, and the Defense of Human Rights 

edited by William Avilés and Leila Celis

Issue 216 | Volume 44 |  Issue 5 | September 2017

Table of Contents

In the 1990s Barry Gills, Joel Rocamora, and Richard Wilson directly challenged the democratic-transitions literature by introducing the model of “low-intensity democracy” a largely procedural democracy that allows political opposition, greater individual freedoms, a reduced institutional role for the armed forces, and a more permeable environment for the investments of transnational capital. Increasingly since the 1970s, low-intensity democracies have been viewed as the political regime best equipped to integrate Latin America into capitalist globalization. This issue is largely dedicated to an examination of these restricted democracies across the region. In contrast to the expectations of much of mainstream democratization scholarship, this issue demonstrates how “democracies” in Latin America have not become more consolidated along some linear continuum.  In fact, they have maintained political and socioeconomic exclusion, military/judicial/paramilitary repression, often through extralegal practices, including the criminalization of protest, massacres, and the forced displacement of whole communities.