Human rights activists protest against femicide and violence in a demonstration at Guatemala Consulado in São Paulo on March 21, 2017 to demand justice for the recent fire that killed 40 girls at a government-run children's shelter in San Jose Pinula, Guatemala. Photo by Cris Faga/NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.
The human rights landscape has become particularly complex in recent years. Traditionally, most attention has been paid to rights as freedom from state oppression or political and civil rights. But the resurgence of socio-economic claims and a greater emphasis on cultural rights have created a more diffuse and nuanced debate. Few areas of the world exemplify these changes more than Latin America. The region witnessed the election of ‘new Left’ governments in the early twenty-first century that, in different ways, sought to open a debate about alternatives to paradigms of neoliberal development and liberal citizenship. What has this meant for how human rights are understood and for patterns of human rights compliance? We conducted a systematic analysis of qualitative and quantitative evidence and our results reveal shifts in how human rights are being interpreted by leftist governments, as well as significant differences in the rights they prioritise. There are advances in the delivery of some human rights and retreat in others, but in general, it is clear that a broader understanding of human rights was adopted across the region.
Assessing human rights compliance
All left-wing governments won power (and were reelected) through generally transparent and free processes. Citizens seem to place particularly high value on democracy in these countries. Yet, while Latin America is not improving overall in terms of freedom of speech and association and the independence of the judiciary, Andean left-wing countries in particular are significantly below the average. Similar trends in the respect of political rights and civil liberties as well as in their overall freedom status are highlighted by Freedom House, with Andean countries showing a consistent and significant deterioration while the Southern Cone has been above average since the early 2000s (Fig. 1). One of the root causes of these problems –especially marked in the Andean countries - is the concentration of authority in the hands of a strong executives, permitting a ‘winner takes all’ approach to key positions within the state, as well as the strong reaction of traditional political and economic elites to the demands for radical change that carried the new Left into office.
