Leigh A. Payne

Violent Democracies in Latin America

Despite recent political movements to establish democratic rule in Latin American countries, much of the region still suffers from pervasive violence. From vigilantism, to human rights violations, to police corruption, violence persists. It is perpetrated by state-sanctioned armies, guerillas, gangs, drug traffickers, and local community groups seeking self-protection. The everyday presence of violence contrasts starkly with governmental efforts to extend civil, political, and legal rights to all citizens, and it is invoked as evidence of the failure of Latin American countries to achieve true democracy. The contributors to this collection take the more nuanced view that violence is not a social aberration or the result of institutional failure; instead, it is intimately linked to the institutions and policies of economic liberalization and democratization. The contributors—anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians—explore how individuals and institutions in Latin American democracies, from the rural regions of Colombia and the Dominican Republic to the urban centers of Brazil and Mexico, use violence to impose and contest notions of order, rights, citizenship, and justice. They describe the lived realities of citizens and reveal the historical foundations of the violence that Latin America suffers today. One contributor examines the tightly woven relationship between violent individuals and state officials in Colombia, while another contextualizes violence in Rio de Janeiro within the transnational political economy of drug trafficking. By advancing the discussion of democratic Latin American regimes beyond the usual binary of success and failure, this collection suggests more sophisticated ways of understanding the challenges posed by violence, and of developing new frameworks for guaranteeing human rights in Latin America. Contributors : Enrique Desmond Arias, Javier Auyero, Lilian Bobea, Diane E. Davis, Robert Gay, Daniel M. Goldstein, Mary Roldan, Todd Landman, Ruth Stanley, Maria Clemencia Ramirez

The Justice Balance: When Transitional Justice Improves Human Rights and Democracy

Evidence from the Transitional Justice Data Base reveals which transitional justice mechanisms and combinations of mechanisms positively or negatively affect human rights and democracy. This article demonstrates that specific combinations of mechanisms—trials and amnesties; and trials, amnesties, and truth commissions—generate improvements in those two political goals. The findings support a justice balance approach to transitional justice: trials provide accountability and amnesties provide stability, advancing democracy and respect for human rights. The project further illustrates that, all else being equal, truth commissions alone have a negative impact on the two political objectives, but contribute positively when combined with trials and amnesty.

Business and democracy in Latin America

Recent political and economic changes sweeping Latin America are strengthening the power of the business class, as the failure of state-led development strategies makes the business sector the primary engine of growth. These six essays deal with this transition in six Latin American countries.

Transitional justice in the world, 1970-2007: Insights from a new dataset

This article presents a new dataset of transitional justice mechanisms utilized worldwide from 1970—2007. These data complement the growing body of quantitative and comparative analyses of transitional justice. This article summarizes three important contributions made by the dataset. First, it includes five transitional justice mechanisms (trials, truth commissions, amnesties, reparations, and lustration policies), allowing scholars to avoid many of the methodological errors committed by performing single-mechanism studies. Second, it provides an expanded sample, both temporally and geographically, to facilitate greater comparative and policy impact. Third, the dataset enables scholars to analyze transitional justice across a variety of political contexts, including democratic transitions and civil wars. These data illuminate a new set of general trends and patterns in the implementation of transitional justice worldwide. The findings show that countries adopt amnesties more often than other mechanisms. They predominantly grant them in the context of civil war and to opponents of the state, rather than state agents. Courts rarely prosecute those currently in power for human rights violations. In civil war settings, rebels, rather than state actors, face trials. In post-authoritarian settings, courts try former authoritarian actors, but do not address crimes committed by the opposition to authoritarian rule. The dataset also reveals regional patterns of mechanism usage. Trials, lustration policies, and reparations occur most often in Europe. Non-European countries more frequently adopt truth commissions and amnesties than do their European counterparts, with a particularly high number of amnesties granted in Latin America.

Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America

Accounting for Violence offers bold new perspectives on the politics of memory in Latin America. Scholars from across the humanities and social sciences provide in-depth analyses of the political economy of memory in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, countries that emerged from authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s. The contributors take up issues of authenticity and commodification, as well as the “never again” imperative implicit in memory goods and memorial sites. They describe how bookstores, cinemas, theaters, the music industry, and television shows (and their commercial sponsors) trade in testimonial and fictional accounts of the authoritarian past; how tourist itineraries have come to include trauma sites and memorial museums; and how memory studies has emerged as a distinct academic field profiting from its own journals, conferences, book series, and courses. The memory market, described in terms of goods, sites, producers, marketers, consumers, and patrons, presents a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, commodifying memory potentially cheapens it. On the other hand, too little public exposure may limit awareness of past human-rights atrocities; such awareness may help to prevent their recurring. Contributors. Rebecca J. Atencio, Ksenija Bilbija, Jo-Marie Burt, Laurie Beth Clark, Cath Collins, Susana Draper, Nancy Gates-Madsen, Susana Kaiser, Cynthia E. Milton, Alice A. Nelson, Carmen Oquendo Villar, Leigh A. Payne, Jose Ramon Ruisanchez Serra, Maria Eugenia Ulfe

Overcoming Barriers to Justice in the Age of Human Rights Accountability

Amnesty laws are viewed as a main barrier to justice for past human rights violations. Scholars and practitioners expected the age of human rights accountability to reduce the number or coverage of amnesty laws that block human rights trials. Based on analysis of an original database of amnesty laws and trials, this article questions that outcome. Few discernible patterns regarding amnesty laws and accountability emerge; human rights trials are nearly as likely in the absence of amnesty laws or where partial laws in compliance with international standards and noncompliant blanket amnesty laws exist. Most of the countries that have overcome the amnesty law barriers to justice are in Latin America. This article thus uses the region to identify a multidimensional approach to pathways to overcome impunity and promote justice for past human rights violations. It considers policy recommendations to strengthen four factors that have advanced accountability in the region: civil society demand, international pressure, judicial leadership, and the absence of veto players.

Allegations of Corporate Human Rights Abuse in Latin America, 2000-2014: Insights from a New Dataset

This article presents a new dataset of allegations of corporate human rights abuse in Latin America from 2000-2014. The dataset responds to growing interest in the role of businesses in human rights violations, accountability processes for corporate abuses, and possible remedies for victims. It is the first dataset of its kind that offers a tool for analyzing five types of allegations of corporate human rights abuse (physical violence, development and poverty, health, environment, and labor) and judicial or non-judicial remedy mechanisms associated with each allegation. Initial analysis of the data shows results that defy assumptions in the existing literature regarding which sectors are most likely to be targeted in allegations of abuse, who makes claims against companies, and the outcomes of those claims for victims of abuse.

Unsettling Bones as Unsettling Accounts

The grandchildren of the Civil War have profoundly affected Spain’s efforts to sustain the pact of oblivion by unburying new evidence through the exhumation of mass graves, accompanied by ceremonial acts and testimonies about past violence. The act of unsettling the bones has also unsettled accounts. The grandchildren benefited from timing. This younger generation lived through the period of silence and oblivion, and only acted and challenged it at a safer moment long after the transition. They themselves did not fear negative repercussions for disturbing Spain’s settled past but instead acted as citizens in a democracy, challenging views, posing alternatives, and making demands for dialogue. They seized a very persuasive stage, moreover, a site in which the violence of the past could not be denied. Due to this timing and staging, these political actors also received an audience. The media covered the exhumations, the events that transpired at them, the revelations and denials. In so doing, a debate ensued, the very early beginnings of contentious coexistence.

Few, Fleeting, and Fugitive Confessions

The expectation that perpetrators’ confessions would set off a public debate did not occur in Spain. When confessions took place, they proved few, fleeting, or fugitive. Perpetrators vanished before a dialogue could begin. Many years had passed since the worst atrocities. Society, still haunted by the memory of these events, wanted to move on. The heroic confessions, which blamed Republicans for the violence that Francoist patriotic forces had to crush, overwhelmed and silenced any alternative version of the past. Spanish society was determined to avoid catalyzing contentious political and social debate over them. This chapter tracks these processes through the confessional acts of Jose Luis de Vilallonga.

Heroic Historic Confessions

During the early stages of the Civil War, some of the main military authorities on the Francoist side confessed to a plan to use brutal and widespread violence to eliminate the Republican enemy. These heroic confessions failed to provoke outrage due to their timing, staging, and audience. Occurring in the midst of the war, they lacked either a public stage or an audience capable of provoking contestation over them. But this type of heroic narrative, glorifying violence, was conveniently forgotten. A settled account emerged instead that emphasized a self-sacrificing heroic struggle by Francoists against Republican atrocities.