Human Rights and Memory Politics under Shifting Political Orientations

ELIZABETH JELIN; CELINA VAN DEMBROUCKE

Legacies of the Left Turn in Latin America. The Promise of Inclusive Citizenship

University of Notre Dame Press

Lugar: Notre Dame; Año: 2020; p. 185 - 210

NOTA:DEBIDO A LA CUARENTENTA, NO TENGO ACCESO AL TEXTO PUBLICADO. SE INCORPORA UN TEXTO EN PDF SIN DIAGRAMACION FINAL.This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the ways Argentina and Chile incorporated the human rights framework to deal with their recent violent past as well as with broader issues, looking at specific processes and results along the period starting from around the turn of the century, with their different paths and specificities. The choice of these two countries is based on several features: both experienced bloody dictatorships in the nineteen seventies and eighties, with military rulers who followed similar strategies in their repressive practices. In both cases, human rights movements emerged as internal opposition to the regimes, backed by the international human rights solidarity community. Furthermore, their transition processes entailed a strong commitment to strengthen democratic institutions and practices, including the expansion of citizenship rights, yet with slightly diverging power and ideological configurations, institutional practices and social mobilization traditions. In order to do this comparative exercise, we provide a brief historical account of how both countries initially adopted the human rights (HHRR, from now on) framework in the transitional years. We quickly move to analyze how this agenda ended up taking shape once democracies were well established and how it was?or not?challenged by changes in ideological leanings of democratically elected governments in both countries since the turn of the century.