Law and Democracy in Latin America
Brazil

Human Rights Under Democracy

As we learned in the first unit, democracy is about more than just voting every four years. What we call democracy, at the beginning of the 21st century, includes a strong component of civil rights - even rights that seem to be unrelated to "politics," narrowly construed. Due process protections in the prosecution of ordinary crime, for example, seem unrelated to regime questions until we notice that arbitrary prosecutions can be used for political purposes. One of the most recent and most prominent examples of this is the recent prosecution on contempt of court charges of the mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. López Obrador was the front-running candidate for president of Mexico, besting candidates of the current and former ruling parties. Even Mexicans who do not support him would probably agree that he was targeted for prosecution because he was the front-runner in the polls. The criminal justice system can and has been used for political purposes in Latin America, and due process protections are one safeguard against this.

But even when the violations of individual rights do not have electoral goals they are troubling for those who value democracy. Are we prepared to say that a country that routinely uses arbitrary police killings to control crime is just as democratic as one in which the police are not free to use deadly force at will? Can we say that a country in which basic civil rights are denied to large parts of the population is just as democratic as another, in which those rights are universally respected - even if elections are free and fair in both?

In this unit, we talk about Latin America's ongoing struggle with human rights violations. We will focus mostly on Brazil, but not because Brazil is alone or even exceptional in this. There is evidence to suggest, for example, that police violence is worse in Caracas than in São Paulo, one of the cities we will read about. Torture, the arbitrary execution of suspects by the police, the denial of basic rights is commonplace in the "brown areas" of many countries in the region. We will use the readings to think about what might be behind this ongoing problem. As we read we may find that it is related to the prevalence of violent crime, the weakness of the state, and many of the issues we have been talking about during the course of the semester.

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