The expansion of rights in almost all of Latin America is being challenged by the growth of police and institutional repression. From Mexico and Guatemala to Argentina and Brazil, repressive forces are out of control.
“Violent police practices are inconsistent with a rights expansion policy” is the title of a report by the Center for Social and Legal Studies (Centro de Estudios Sociales y Legales, CELS), chaired by Horacio Verbitsky. [1] The report highlights “serious acts of institutional violence” in several Buenos Aires neighborhoods, as well as “violence in jails and police stations” and the return of the repression of social protest.
In its analysis, CELS exposes “the lack of a structural reform of the security system”, in the case of Argentina, centered on “street control”. He sites the need for public debate on “what a democratic security system should be.” Argentina can serve as an example of the deterioration of human rights throughout the region, with the most critical expressions in Mexico and Guatemala.
These violations are not random or occasional in a continent undergoing increasing militarization and paramilitarization of everyday life. In Uruguay, the erosion of human rights is expressed in the torture of youth detained for minor offenses.[2]In Brazil, the massacre of favela residents has become systematic, as revealed by the Maes de Maio, who recorded at least one slaughter per year since 1990– under democracy.[3] In Mexico and Guatemala, the assassination of indigenous people, women, and the poor are commonplace. The media often attribute the killings to drug traffickers or occasional outbursts of security forces. But this explanation seems insufficient. Or, worse, it covers up the reality.
Argentina exemplifies the deterioration of recent years for two reasons. First because there are independent human rights organizations that, since the end of dictatorship in 1984, have carefully recorded state and institutional violations. Second, because the Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernandez governments have pledged to defend human rights since 2003, denouncing violations and avoiding repression.
A report by the Coalition Against Police and Institutional Repression (Coordinadora Contra la Represión Policial e Institucional, Correpi) titled “A privileged society sustained by repression,” refers to the cases of gatillo fácil (“trigger-happy” police murders), deaths in jails and police holding cells, and victims of repression of protest. Up to November of last year, there were 4,011 people killed. 47% were between 15 and 25 years old, and 27% between 26 and 35 (see graphs).[4]
But most symptomatic, and disturbing, part of the report is the chart of police killings over time. In the ten years of the Carlos Menem administration (1989-1999), police killed an average of 58 people each year. His government was savagely neoliberal, privatized all state enterprises, delivering–mostly giving them away–to foreign companies. It was a government repressive against the people. But in the ten years of Kirchner and Fernández (2003-2013), an average of 232 people died at the hands of the police a year – four times as many (see chart). Yet these governments took human rights seriously, sent a portion of the police leadership into retirement for corruption, and pledged to avoid repression, based on what the CELS calls the “political control” of security forces.
EXTRAVISM AND VIOLENCE
Notwithstanding, a regression, spanning the last decade, has taken place. This trend cannot be attributed to cyclical issues, the mismanagement of a ministry, or an occasional retreat from state to military control.
Instead, three crucial reasons explain this involution, which transcends Argentina and, with nuances and differences, applies to all of Latin America. First, the socio-economic model; second, the autonomy of repressive apparatuses; and third, fear of popular sector protest.
The current period has been defined as an economy of accumulation by dispossession or plundering that naturally relies on institutional and non-institutional violence. Stealing from people and stealing from nature can only be done by violence. The objective is the obliteration of entire communities to appropriate nature and convert it into commodities, as has been denounced by Subcomandante Marcos in his text “Fourth World War”. “The Fourth World War is destroying humanity as globalization is universalizing the market, and everything human that opposes the logic of the market is an enemy and must be destroyed. In this sense, we are all the enemy to be vanquished: indigenous, non-indigenous, human rights observers, teachers, intellectuals, artists.”[5]
Unlike what happens with accumulation by dispossession in urban and middle class zones (generally privatization), for sectors that have never been socially included or benefited from “welfare,” the extractive model works to conquer territories, destroy enemies, and administer conquered space, subordinating them to capital. Indigenous, black, and mestizo peoples, peasant farmers, poor women, and unemployed, informal workers and children in urban peripheries suffer this type of dispossession.
In indigenous/black/mestizo Latin America, the primary modes of discipline have historically not been the panopticon (a device for watching workers without them knowing) nor the satanic mill, but massacre or threat of massacre (read: extermination), whether under colonial rule or during the Republican periods, in dictatorships and democracies, until today. The Maes de Maio organization was created by the mothers of the 500 killed in repressive acts in São Paulo in May 2006. The organization states that between 1990 and 2012, there were 25 killings of favela residents – young, black and poor.
This reality has much to do with the extractive model, but also with the type of state that has been constructed in the region. The Latin American nation-state differs from the European nation-state, as Aníbal Quijano reminds us. Here, the democratization of a society that could be expressed in a democratic state wasn’t registered; social relations were fixed on the colonial structure of power established on the idea of race. This became the basic factor in the construction of the nation state, as Quijano continues to point out.
The current production model deepens these elements of colonial rule: the division of our countries into “zones of being” and “zones of non-being.” In the latter, lives don’t count, and repression is not occasional, but the norm. And to assert their rights, citizens cannot go to a state institution, but instead rise and rebel, as is clearly shown by what happened in Mexico after the disappearance of 43 students from a teaching college in Ayotzinapa.
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