‘Human Rights in Argentina: reflecting on the past 20 years’

MERCEDES BARROS

Leiden, Holanda

Conferencia; Society for Latin American Studies 2004 Annual Conference; 2004

University of Leiden

My paper will look at new forms of ordinary people political participation developed in Argentina in the last twenty five years; in particular, it will explore the emergence and development of the human rights groups during the 1970s and 1980s and their irreducible effects on the country during the 1990s. I will attempt to show how the dislocatory effects of the unprecedented repression unleashed by the last military regime, the generalised paralysis of the political forces as well as the lethargy of the rest of the social actors, prompted the emergence of a new form of political identification that found its expression in the mobilisation of ‘ordinary people’ and its conditions of existence in the availability of the human rights discourse. I will later explain how this new political subject articulated a new conception of rights that would actually inform the post-dictatorship understanding of democracy and citizenship and which would entail a new relationship among the people, the law and the state. Finally, I will conclude by showing how this new human rights demand inaugurated a new form of political participation with distinctive political strategies upon which different and later forms of popular protests would be drawn