The Local, the Regional and the Global: Transforming the Politics of Rights

Abstract

This book addresses the recent evolution of women’s movements in Latin America, and, in so doing, seeks to demonstrate the wider rele-vance of this history for the comparative study of women’s rights. To those who live in conditions of stable democracy, issues of rights and legal reform tend not to appear urgent or pressing unless as occurred in regard to reproductive rights, social movements make them so. In Latin America where liberal guarantees had been violated by decades of authoritarian rule, women’s movements from the 1980s placed a special value on the ‘right to have rights’ and worked for the restoration of the rule of law, democracy and basic civil liberties. But at the same time, the language of rights and citizenship was deployed not only to restore or to improve upon formal legal rights, but also to deepen the democratic process. The affirmation of a culture of rights grew out of popular social movements in Latin America. ‘Rights talk’ was used to raise awareness among the poor and the socially marginal-ised of their formal legal rights, but also to call into question their lack of substantive rights. The language of rights thus became a way of making claims for social justice as well as for recognition in an idiom that framed such demands ‘as a basic right of citizenship’ (Baierle 1998: 124).

This chapter draws on the authors’ interviews with women’s rights activists in Latin America and on other thematic discussions in related areas. See in particular: Craske (1999, 2000), Molyneux (2000a, 2000b, 2000c), and Molyneux and Lazar (2002). We would like to thank Fiona Macaulay for her helpful comments on an earlier draft.