Human Rights Movement and Discourse

MERCEDES MARÍA BARROS

EDUVIM

Lugar: Villa Maria; Año: 2012 p. 282

978-987-1727-88-9

This books accounts for the process of emergence and constitution of the human rights movement and discourse during the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983). Central to this account is the contention that the movement’s emergence and constitution should not be understood as a necessary or as a natural response to the atrocities carried out by the last military regime, but instead as the result of a contingent process of political articulation and as a response which could have failed in its constitution and success.  Thus, the appearance of the human rights movement and discourse in the country can only be understood in its full complexity if special attention is given to this very process of popular mobilisation and political articulation that took place during 1976-1982.  This book begins by putting the human rights movement and its discourse into a historical and political perspective in order to map out the discursive context in which this new movement and discourse emerged. Later, it explains how the dislocatory effects of the illegal repression unleashed by the military regime, along with the generalised paralysis and silence of the main social and political forces provoked a temporal suspension of meaning that eventually forced the appearance of a new form of political identification. This new political identity constituted around the defence of human rights was made possible by the engagement of the affected groups in different social and political practices and by means of an increasingly available human rights language. The availability of this language allowed the articulation of the claims for the disappeared people, for truth and justice around the central notion of human rights and the gradual identification of the relatives of the victims with the human rights cause and struggle. The book finally addresses the unprecedented centrality the human rights movement and discourse acquired during the transition to democracy and examines the way this political demand occupied a crucial position within the political formation that dominated the first years of the democratic era.