Rights in Latin America

      This weeks readings provide four very different approaches about thinking about human rights in Latin America. Here I will look at two of these. First, in the writing of Simón Bolívar, he explains the Venezuelan people as “Americans by birth and Europeans by law,” which produces tension within the people causing them to contend with natives for titles of ownership and, at the same time, attempt to maintain rights against the opposition of invaders (33). He also claims that as nature makes men unequal, in intelligence, temperate and strength, the purpose of laws are meant to correct this difference by placing the individual in society so that education, industry, the arts, the services and the virtues can give him a fictitious equality (that is properly called political and social) (39). But as the idea of absolute freedom is pernicious and only the product of abstract theories, Bolívar maintains that people do not only have rights but also responsibilities (contractarian idea that the relationship between individuals and the state is a contract in which both sides have rights and obligations. To maintain the contract, the state guarantees basic rights to individuals while the individual has a resposibility to obey the laws). For Bolívar, public power thus, must be in the limits prescribed by reason and interest and the national will must conform to the possibilities allowed by the fair distribution of power (47). He calls for a republic linked with responsibility.

     In the writing of Margaret E. Crahan, she maintains that seventeenth and eighteenth century Spain and consequently, Latin American did not have the same evolution of rights, as did England or France, because it lacked a strong basis for the necessary expansion (24). She claims that the failure of the Spanish to consolidate power in centralized bureaucracies limited the development of more universalistic goals for government and diminished its role as an instrument of non-elites (29). Authority was thus, transferred from the monarchy to aristocratic and commercial elites, who used control of the state to ensure the continuance of their privileged position within society. As the monarch was financially dependent on elites, this meant that the latter could exact concessions. The dominant pattern in the Spanish empire was to avoid or to be exempted from state authority, rather than to expand basic rights (30).