Human Rights in Latin America

Human Rights in Latin America
Author: Sonia Cardenas
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2012-06-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 081220154X

For the last half century, Latin America has been plagued by civil wars, dictatorships, torture, legacies of colonialism and racism, and other evils. The region has also experienced dramatic—if uneven—human rights improvements. The accounts of how Latin America's people have dealt with the persistent threats to their fundamental rights offer lessons for people around the world. Human Rights in Latin America: A Politics of Terror and Hope is the first textbook to provide a comprehensive introduction to the human rights issues facing an area that constitutes more than half of the Western Hemisphere. Leading human rights researcher and educator Sonia Cardenas brings together regional examples of both terror and hope, emphasizing the dualities inherent in human rights struggles. Organized by three pivotal topics—human rights violations, reform, and accountability—this book offers an authoritative synthesis of research on human rights on the continent. From historical accounts of abuse to successful transnational campaigns and legal battles, Human Rights in Latin America explores the tensions underlying a vast range of human rights initiatives. In addition to surveying the roles of the United States, relatives of the disappeared, and truth commissions, Cardenas covers newer ground in addressing the colonial and ideological underpinnings of human rights abuses, emerging campaigns for disability and sexuality rights, and regional dynamics relating to the International Criminal Court. Engagingly written and fully illustrated, Human Rights in Latin America creates an important niche among human rights and Latin American textbooks. Ample supplementary resources—including discussion questions, interdisciplinary reading lists, filmographies, online resources, internship opportunities, and instructor assignments—make this an especially valuable text for use in human rights courses.

After Human Rights

After Human Rights
Author: Fernando J. Rosenberg
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2017-03-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0822981432

Fernando J. Rosenberg explores Latin American artistic production concerned with the possibility of justice after the establishment, rise, and ebb of the human rights narrative around the turn of the last century. Prior to this, key literary and artistic projects articulated Latin American modernity by attempting to address and supplement the state's inability to embody and enact justice. Rosenberg argues that since the topics of emancipation, identity, and revolution no longer define social concerns, Latin American artistic production is now situated at a point where the logic and conditions of marketization intersect with the notion of rights through which subjects define themselves politically. Rosenberg grounds his study in discussions of literature, film, and visual art (novels of political re-foundations, fictions of truth and reconciliation, visual arts based on cases of disappearance, films about police violence, artistic collaborations with police forces, and judicial documentaries.) In doing so, he provides a highly original examination of the paradoxical demands on current artistic works to produce both capital value and foster human dignity.

The Millennium Development Goals

The Millennium Development Goals
Author:
Publisher: Santiago, Chile : United Nations
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2005
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

This publication examines the progress made on development issues and related challenges in the Latin American and Caribbean region five years after the Millennium Development Goals and associated targets were agreed by the international community. Focusing on the key theme of inequality, seven chapters consider the following issues: combating poverty and hunger; access to educational opportunities as a pillar of human development; gender equality and women's empowerment; health-related targets; ensuring environmental sustainability; financing aspects of the MDGs and international development assistance.

Feminism for the Americas

Feminism for the Americas
Author: Katherine M. Marino
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469649705

This book chronicles the dawn of the global movement for women's rights in the first decades of the twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the United States, however, or in Europe. Instead, Katherine M. Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women whose deep friendships and intense rivalries forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism. Six dynamic activists form the heart of this story: from Brazil, Bertha Lutz; from Cuba, Ofelia Domingez Navarro; from Uruguay, Paulina Luisi; from Panama, Clara Gonzalez; from Chile, Marta Vergara; and from the United States, Doris Stevens. This Pan-American network drove a transnational movement that advocated women's suffrage, equal pay for equal work, maternity rights, and broader self-determination. Their painstaking efforts led to the enshrinement of women's rights in the United Nations Charter and the development of a framework for international human rights. But their work also revealed deep divides, with Latin American activists overcoming U.S. presumptions to feminist superiority. As Marino shows, these early fractures continue to influence divisions among today's activists along class, racial, and national lines. Marino's multinational and multilingual research yields a new narrative for the creation of global feminism. The leading women introduced here were forerunners in understanding the power relations at the heart of international affairs. Their drive to enshrine fundamental rights for women, children, and all people of the world stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when global thinking meets local action.

Mobilizing for Human Rights in Latin America

Mobilizing for Human Rights in Latin America
Author: Edward L. Cleary
Publisher: Kumarian Press
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 1565492412

In the follow-up to his widely read The Struggle for Human Rights in Latin America, author Edward Cleary examines some of the robust human rights movements of the past two decades in Mobilizing for Human Rights in Latin America. Advocates of the rights of women, indigenous groups, the landless, and street children have achieved notable gains, so much so that in 1999 the New York Times claimed that women have achieved more rights in Latin America than in any other region. Cleary establishes a record of why, how, where, and when human rights reached this level. It is often assumed that the concept of human rights is something that must be imported by Western liberal democracies to developing countries. Cleary shows that human rights has a long history in Latin America distinctive from other traditions and that this tradition has expressed itself profoundly since the military period. He argues that the region’s unique history is not only creating solutions to issues such as corruption and minority rights, but also can offer a valuable balance to the larger international discourse on human rights.

Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean

Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean
Author: Tina Hilgers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2017-09-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1107193176

This volume examines violence across Latin America and the Caribbean to demonstrate the importance of subnational analysis over national aggregates.

Mexico's Human Rights Crisis

Mexico's Human Rights Crisis
Author: Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2019-01-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0812251075

Lawless elements are ascendant in Mexico, as evidenced by the operations of criminal cartels engaged in human and drug trafficking, often with the active support or acquiescence of government actors. The sharp increase in the number of victims of homicide, disappearances and torture over the past decade is unparalleled in the country's recent history. According to editors Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz and Barbara Frey, the "war on drugs" launched in 2006 by President Felipe Calderón and the corrupting influence criminal organizations have on public institutions have empowered both state and nonstate actors to operate with impunity. Impunity, they argue, is the root cause that has enabled a human-rights crisis to flourish, creating a climate of generalized violence that is carried out, condoned, or ignored by the state and precluding any hope for justice. Mexico's Human Rights Crisis offers a broad survey of the current human rights issues that plague Mexico. Essays focus on the human rights consequences that flow directly from the ongoing "war on drugs" in the country, including violence aimed specifically at women, and the impunity that characterizes the government's activities. Contributors address the violation of the human rights of migrants, in both Mexico and the United States, and cover the domestic and transnational elements and processes that shape the current human rights crisis, from the state of Mexico's democracy to the influence of rulings by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the decisions of Mexico's National Supreme Court of Justice. Given the scope, the contemporaneity, and the gravity of Mexico's human rights crisis, the recommendations made in the book by the editors and contributors to curb the violence could not be more urgent. Contributors: Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz, Karina Ansolabehere, Ariadna Estévez, Barbara Frey, Janice Gallagher, Rodrigo Gutiérrez Rivas, Susan Gzesh, Sandra Hincapié, Catalina Pérez Correa, Laura Rubio Díaz-Leal, Natalia Saltalamacchia, Carlos Silva Forné, Regina Tamés, Javier Treviño-Rangel, Daniel Vázquez, Benjamin James Waddell.

Mixed Signals

Mixed Signals
Author: Kathryn Sikkink
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2018-09-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 150172990X

"Nowhere did two understandings of U.S. identity—human rights and anticommunism—come more in conflict with each other than they did in Latin America. To refocus U.S. policy on human rights and democracy required a rethinking of U.S. policy as a whole. It required policy makers to choose between policies designed to defeat communism at any cost and those that remain within the bounds of the rule of law."—from the Introduction Kathryn Sikkink believes that the adoption of human rights policy represents a positive change in the relationship between the United States and Latin America. In Mixed Signals she traces a gradual but remarkable shift in U.S. foreign policy over the last generation. By the 1970s, an unthinking anticommunist stance had tarnished the reputation of the U.S. government throughout Latin America, associating Washington with tyrannical and often brutally murderous regimes. Sikkink recounts the reemergence of human rights as a substantive concern, showing how external pressures from activist groups and the institution of a human rights bureau inside the State Department have combined to remake Washington's agenda, and its image, in Latin America. The current war against terrorism, Sikkink warns, could repeat the mistakes of the past unless we insist that the struggle against terrorism be conducted with respect for human rights and the rule of law.

Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean

Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean
Author: Elizabeth Maier
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2010
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0813547288

"This is a very exciting collection that will fill an important gap in what has emerged in comparative studies of women and Latin American democracies. Maier and Lebon provide provocative overview essays, and the chapters trace a range of cases from Argentina and Brazil to Nicaragua and Venezuela, showing how institutions. leaders and culture all shape the opportunities and challenges women face."---Jane Jaquette, editor of Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America --

Institutional Frameworks for Social Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean

Institutional Frameworks for Social Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean
Author: Rodrigo Martínez
Publisher: UN
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2018
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Foreword .-- Introduction .-- Part 1. Social policy institutions. -- Chapter I. Institutional framework for social development / Rodrigo Martínez, Carlos Maldonado Valera .-- Chapter II. Social development and social protection institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean: overview and challenges / Rodrigo Martínez, Carlos Maldonado Valera .-- Part 2. Components and institutional framewoek of social protection. -- Chapter III. Labour market regulation and social protection: institutional challenges / Mario D. Velásquez Pinto .-- Chapter IV. Institutional aspects of Latin America's pension systems / Andras Uthoff .-- Chapter V. Care as a pillar of social protection: rights, policies and institutions in Latin America / María Nieves Rico, Claudia Robles .-- Part 3. Policies for specific populations and their institutional framework .-- Chapter VI. Life cycle and social policies: youth institutions in the region / Daniela Trucco .-- Chapter VII. Disability and public policy: institutional progress and challenges in Latin America / Heidi Ullmann .-- Chapter VIII. Latin American Afrodescendants: institutional framework and public policies / Marta Rangel.