Democracy, human rights and peace

The history of Latin America and the Caribbean has been one of colonialism, interventionism, oppression, and human rights violations. However, it has also been a history of struggle for freedom, justice, and equality. These persistent tensions between domination and resistance have led to significant confrontations, armed conflicts, and civil wars. The unwavering determination of the dominant sectors to maintain the capitalist model and preserve their privileges has fueled the persecution of all individuals or groups perceived as threats to the established order.

Human rights violations have been a historical practice, though they have taken on diverse forms depending on the context and power dynamics. They have become especially brutal in the context of coups d'état and military dictatorships that have established state terrorism as a strategy for exercising power, through repressive practices such as threats, persecution, political imprisonment, torture, murder, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, illegal surveillance, and the repression of freedom of expression, assembly, and association.

The struggle for human rights and freedom is an integral part of resistance against totalitarian governments and the fight for the restoration of democracy—in contexts of dictatorship—and for peace—in contexts of war or armed conflict. The conviction that human rights violations harm not only their direct victims but also the society in which they occur, and that confronting their legacy is fundamental to preserving democracy and peace, has led human rights organizations to advocate for public policies of memory and reparation, and to include these demands in the agendas of processes of transition to representative democracy and/or peace.

What we know as the “transitional process” is a globalized model for managing past conflicts. It consists of applying—with the specificities of local realities—a set of institutional mechanisms and developing cultural artifacts that seek to confront the past of human rights violations by reconciling the conflicting parties. The ultimate goal is to ensure that political violence remains in the past and is NEVER repeated. Transitions have a foundational purpose, based on the promise of a peaceful society where violence has no place. To this end, certain truths are promoted: about the past, about politics, and about possible futures.

However, among the issues that transitions leave unresolved is the question of what kind of democracy is being built and what utopian vision is being pursued. The recent history of Latin America and the Caribbean shows that repressive violence and human rights violations perpetrated by the state remain commonplace, demonstrating that the false dichotomy between dictatorship/democracy and war/peace is part of the illusions of transition.

This platform is a collaborative space where we will revisit these topics, reflecting together on these three inseparable processes: Democracy, Human Rights, and Peace. We operate under the premise that strengthening representative democracy and building just and egalitarian societies requires constructing a culture of Human Rights, a State that guarantees them, and a civil society that mobilizes to defend them. We also recognize that promoting the construction of open, pluralistic, and dynamic collective memories is fundamental to achieving this. However, it is not just about the law—whether guaranteed or demanded—but about building a culture and social relations that recognize and respect differences. From a conceptual standpoint, we propose a view of Human Rights, Democracy, and Peace that considers their historicity and their claim to universality in conjunction with cultural and social specificities and power relations.