The Politics of Violence and Resistance in Latin America

The Politics of Rights in Argentina by Alison Brysk

ESTABLISHING TRUTH: most governments that respec human rights have been created not from the top down but from the bottom up; nowhere else in the world have former military rulers been tried for human rights violations by an elected civilian government; demand for more state accountability; where are the disappeared; the human rights movement was limited by the magnitue of ideologies; institutional changes are necessary but not sufficient; The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP)-->investigate human rights violations, bicameral commission, staff provided by the human rights movement; Exhumation of unidentified bodes-->destruction of evidence in mass exhumations, find proof of childbirth which allowed people to know whether or not they had missing grandchildren; "we know who the murdered are, we want to know who the murderers are"'; ESTABLISHING JUSTICE: democratization came out of the search for justice; trials of military officers which was aimed at the reestablishment of the rule of law; the Supreme Military Council had failed to judge the alleged crimes; it showcased an obscene amount of civilian complicity; acts committed also violated many laws of war; the mere process of being judged inspired political objections; Aldo Rico and the carapintada rebellions; due obedience allowed many appeals to go which allowed continued murderers to go free; missing children and grandchildren; REFORMING THE STATE: in order to consolidate the reforms introduced by the human rights movement, democratic accountability must be extended to the state's core coercive power; Argentine transition to democracy was highly conditioned by the continued military veto power, institutional legacies and lack of resources; reform strategies treated the military as a group of problematic individuals to be subordinated to a new set of rules rather than an estate to be dissolved; "The exercise of state terror had eroded both the control and the lefitimacy of coercion. Any successor regime would face the task of dismantling or deactivating the repressive apparatus, composed of the military, some elements of the police, members of the intelligence services, and 'free-lance' civilians. A democratic regime would be required by its mandate to incude these forces to submit to the rule of law, and to survive it would need to transform their interests from undermining democracy to defending it"; military operating as a parallel source of state power; restructuring, reorientation of strategic doctrine and reeducation; removal of undemocratic actors; budget cuts; starving elephant: resources have been diminished but the nature of the beast remains unchanged; the military's traditional interest are being threatened by the democratic regime; INSTITUTIONALIZING SAFEGUARDS: restructuring of the relationship between political society and the state; police and penal reform; extension of judicial supervision of police procedures and reduce discretionary police power; repeal of repressive legislation; restructuring to guarantee civil rights; increase of accountability through judicial supervision; La Tablada 1982 resurfacing of guerrilla violence; human rights movement played a much more limited and reactive role in institutionalizing than in initiating human rights reform; the most enduring legacy of Argentina's human rights movement: outside the state, in the creation of citizens

State Terrorism in Latin America: Chile, Argentina and International Human Rights by Thomas C. Wright

Influence of the Great Depression on the turn to authoritarianism; Peron's military/personalistic government: redistribution of income towards labor, alienation of economic and social elites, selective repression which was ingrained in Argentina's political culture and made it ungovernable except by force; Between 1955-1973 there is an oscillation between military and civilian government; 1966 General Juan Calos Ongania creates a national security state after a coup of an elective government, he is very repressive; Cordobazo-->massive but short lived uprising of workers and students in Cordoba in recation to Ongania's policies--->this leads to a powerful urban guerrilla movement (ERP and Montoneros), fueled by (exiled) Peron's support for the Montoneros; Peron comes back to power and betrays the left by not fulfilling the socialist promises he had made while in exile; AAA paramilitary death squad created by Peron; 1974-on: exponential growth of leftist terror and rightist counterterror, Operation Independence against ERP in Tucuman and coup in March 1976; mass diffusion of terror to paralyze any attempt at opposition; decree 2772 gave the military the ability to wage war in whatever way they saw fit; El Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional led by General Jorge Rafael Videla led to the suspension of the constitution and political parties, the division of the country into security zones but was never a personal dictatorship (junta militar); By the time of the coup, the battle against guerrillas was actually winding down; depsite reality, the military would publicly claim throughout their nearly 8 years in power, and thereafter, that the grave threat posed by the guerrilla justified all their repressive actions; State Terrorism: expansion of intelligence capabilities, National Security Doctrine, absolute military control to eliminate the threat of a Marxist insurrection and victory, prolongation of military rule to put off the inevitable consequences that would come with civilian rule; In its war on subversion, the dictatorship organized a system of repression that recognized no legal or moral boundaries or constraints on the military's power; "First we kill all the subversives, then we will kill their collaborators, then...their sympathizers, then...those who remain indifferent; and finally, we will kill the timid" pg 107; The Disappeared: los desaparecidos, uncertainty of the experience of the victim, government is able to enjoy plausible deniability, intensified and prolonged the general state of terror, because more were missing than were dead, it allowed for compliance as well as discouraged outcries and opposition--many hoped that their mising family members would be returned alive, children from women in detention centers were given to childless military families; decentralized authority over life and death; deliberate creation of a society of fear to secure and extend control; fear is a jail without bars; many institutions were complicit in the dirty war; Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo; use of the 1978 world cup as a validation of the regime and the policies; Jimmy Carter made Argentina a priority for his human rights based foreign policy-->the mutually reinforcing work of domestic human rights organizations, internaitonal human rights organizations, governments and Carter administration began to bear fruit; 1978 visit by the inter-American commission on Human Rights and the subsequent 1980 report described human rights violations as a deliberate policy set by the junta, not just actions against guerrillas, excesses or mistakes; General Roberto Viola in 1981, severe economic crisis, Galtteri replaces Viola and invades the Falkland islands in Dec 1981 which is a national disaster; The Final Document--one last protection for the military regime

Feminicide in Latin America and the Movement for Women's Human Rights by Adriana Carmona Lopez, Alma Gomez Caballero and Lucha Castro Rodriguez

gender violence "is a political mechanism for domination--one that is understood as the control and natural supremacy of men and institutions over women and that implies subjection, subordination, punishment, harm, and in the most extreme form, elimination of women"; FEMINICIDE: the murder of women and girls because they are female; General Law of Women's Access to a Life Free from Violence: feminicide is the most extreme form of violence against women, which has been expressed as violence of class, ethnicity, ideology, and politics. Culminating in death, this violence has been accompanied by impunity and the absence of justice; intimate, child. familial, stigmatized occupations, systematic sexual (organized and unorganized); factors to explain murders: maquiladora employment, migration, significant gang presence, drug trafficking and established cartels, and the Mexican politicla context; "In her annual report before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Erturk formulated concrete critiques of the impunity, socioeconomic inequities, and machista values that perpetuate gender violence"; Chihuahua: high rank in terms of employment, but nearly half the state lives below the poverty line; 67.7% of women older than 15 have experienced community, family, paternal, educational, work, or intimate violence; delegitimization of victims and justifications for their deaths based on their assumed activities; Justice for Our Daughters, Center for Women's Human Rights, Women Dressed in Black and the 'Ni Una Mas' Campaign, Disappeared Women--Special unit for the investigation of missing or lost persons (lost persons has a bad connotation and stigmatizes the victim); gender discrimination reflected in the way that cases are investigated; kidnappings-->authorities claim that disappearances are not a crime; trials were often illegal in some way--torture of suspects for false confessions; "sexual violence is rooted in structural systems and laws that must be changed"

Chapter 2, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit by Virginia Garrand-Burnett

la violencia was a culmination of the Guatemalan Military Project-->final solution for problems that had formed since the coup that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz and also a way to control and eliminate political challenge to the state; presidency of Rios Montt in 1982 because of displeasure with Lucas Garcia (who also managed to push more people to join the guerrilla than would have without his actions); the guerrilla movement dates back to 1954 and the Arbenz overthrow set off a cycle of political violence and counterviolence which would last for more that 3.5 decades; counterinsurgency came out of the military government established in the 1960s, constitution was suspended in 1955 in favor of National Security Doctrine which was the ideological centerpiece of the US-inspired anticommunist strategy in LA and allowed the military to justify the repression of the left; the international contextual framing sanctioned irregular warfare; the death squads and desaparecidos were a specific strategy, not just a byproduct of the process; Between 1967-1974 there is a civilian election, the Green Revolution (which exacerbated rural poverty and caused large levels of urban migration and a land shortage); increased political awareness of the Maya in this time period as well; The Segundo Momento Guerrillero: EGP and ORPA, expansion of ideological base to include emerging political groups, youth, university students; incorporation of the indigenous into the left "complete vindication of the indigeound through their participation in the revolution"; CUC 'Comite de Unidad Campesina'; overall boom in mass organization from 1975-1978; URNG-->four guerrilla groups came together but they had difficulty in framing the ideology in a way to address the social and economic problems unique to the Mayan experience because they did not want to alienate the ladinos while incorporating the indigenous; 1974 election and the 1976 earthquake marked the beginning of indiscriminate repression: fragile political and social infrastructure is shattered, momentum to popular resistance; escalation in violence with Lucas Garcia: the army began systematically hunting down anyone assumed to be associated with the guerrillas; The Spanish Embassy Fire: occupation by CUC and then Lucas orders the burning of the Spanish Embassy; occupation was mostly peaceful and symbolic but it was bombed and set on fire with the occupants locked inside; Guatemalans from that point on could expect their government to meet public dissent with merciless and overwhelming violence; Declaration of Iximche: embassy holocaust as the last straw of more than 4 centuries of discrimination, repression, exploitation, and massacres by foreign invaders and continued unto the present by their most savage and criminal descendants; Lucas years showed the faltering ability of the military to rule, and its tendency to use violence to protect its own power and interest

From Democracy to Democratization and Back: Before Transitions from Authoritarian Rule by Terry Lynn Karl

transition: a distinctive moment in the political life and trajectory of a country--a period of unknown duration and extraordinary uncertainty that is generally initiated from dynamics within the autocratic regime (high degree of unpredictability); democratic transition: process of liberalization of authoritarian rule, the formation/resurrection of civil society, holding fair elections of uncertain outcome; Fallacy of electoralism: minimalist definition which foregoes accountability; regime transition v. regime consolidation; some transitions can be subject to more constraints than others (structured contingency); democratization is the result of a combination of causes, not one single cause; the consolidation of democracy is defined by the substatntial reduction in the uncertainty that is so central to transition--institutionalizing some degree of certainty through a common set of rules; modes of transition are usually distinguished by factors such as the identity of the primary agent of change or the degree of control the outgoing rulers exert over the process; pacted democratic transitions are theorized to be better based on the need to compromise

Guatemala Lecture 5

why did something like genocide happen as opposed to something else?; construction of threat; genocide as contingent, not inevitable; October 1981-August 1983 1000 massacres take place as a single episode within a 36-year conflict; periods of violence separated between Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt, but the number of massacres increases immediately with Rios Montt; 1954 CIA-organized coup against Jacobo Arbenz, development of first guerrilla insurgency; protracted, prolonged, brutally violent, historically shaped armed conflict; EGP (1972) returns to Guatemala from Mexico and base themselves in most marginalized communities, begin discourse and strategic narrative in these marginalized societies and entrap the people into supporting them; prolonged popular war; 1975: first public execution, of El Tigre and this pushed peokple towards supporting the EGP because they are scared that it will also happen to them; people flood towards the guerrilla because of the military reaction (which was focused mostly on the civilians anyway); from the late 1970s-1981 there is an increase in guerrilla activity and it becomes clear that it is at least becoming a serious threat, especially in the context of the recent Sandinista success; Lucas Garcia government was irredeemably corrupt and highly ineffectual in counterinsurgence, and focused on a policy of 100% killing; November 1981 began the scorched earth campaign which began in Chimaltenango and moved outwards across the highlands; it was a systematic, organized, planned massacre of men and women with mass public rape and torture; burning of crops and killing of animals to starve out the guerrillas and the support base; "drain the sea to kill the fish"; it does not begin as an ethnic conflict but because of the guerrilla decision to base support in the indigenous communities, the state brings the fight to them and wipes them out; Operation Ashes (Lucas) and Victoria 82 (Montt) focus on targetting of the civilian population (the support base of the guerrillas); by 1983, the guerrilla was basically finished; confinement of the population in model villages: a means of preventing subversion from cropping up once more, indigenous languages and ancestral rights were prohibited, which continued the effect of the massacre-->was a prevention of the reproduction of indigenous culture; Genocidal Preconditions: state doesn't belong to the indians, it belongs to the ladinos, when they become mobilized, they become a serious threat; if you have an entire society who knew what was happening and corroborated and let it happen, then who is responsible?; history of racism and history of slaughter; dehumanization of the indigenous, atrocity-justifying discourses; Midlarsky: construction of the threat (real or perceived) is critical--> during war and conflict, narratives of threat become increased, genocide emerges as a radical solution to an intolerable threat, population must be vulerable to mass murder, perpetrators must experience or perceive a degree of vulnerability, and any process which increases threat to and vulnerability of the state and comes froma group of civilian population increases the probability of genocide

Negotiating Peace and Multiple Forms of Violence: The Protracted Search for a Settlement to the Armed Conflicts in Colombia by Marc Chernick

new permanent National Council for Peace; disarmament and reincorporation of several smaller groups; rise of powerful new actors tied to the drug trade, proliferation of paramilitary groups, militarily stronger guerrilla movements, and a large population of internally displaced peoples; as time and history pass, the ability to negotiate successfully seems to recede; entrenched guerrilla control plus loss of state cohesion, plus the fragmentation of monopoy on arms; political violence revolves around territorial control; relationship between political violence and other types of violence is important; accelerated concentration of land ownership in the countryside, absence or partial collapse of the state in large areas of territory, massive expulsion of peasants from their lands, large internal migration, multiplicity of armed actors; 1989-1991: sectors begin to actively rethink historic role and place a value on democratic and electoral politics as a viable means of reaching power; the FARC and ELN demand major social, structural and economic reform as part of a peace negotiation; transformation from ideological movements to large, successful criminal enterprises; should negotiations be between all the guerrilla groups or conducted separately; "Colombians took up arms betcase they were denied channels of participation beyond patronage politics"; violence was facilitated by a historically weak state; extralegal armed groups were able to substitute the state and provide basic services; "armed movements distort social movements, invite violence, and undermine community leadership"; popular protest and armed struggle obey separate and contradictory logics; drug trade has complicaed the original dynamics of leftist inspired insurgencies; Two Decades of Negotiating Peace in Colombia: regular negotiations with the FARC and ELN; individual groups have laid down arms, but the number of men and women under arms increased and so did the incidence of political violence; how do you negotiate with insurgent groups that are not internationally recognized without coferring on them an undeserved legitimacy; Betancur: amnesty and assistance to former guerrillas, political reformation and democratic opening, Union Patriotica; Barco: unilateral ceasefire of M-19, focus on disarmament and reincorporation, shift to a focus on urban crime; Cesar Gaviria: used the Barco model of unilateral ceasefre in return for representation in constitutional assembly, government attacks on non-compliant groups, failure of demobilized groups in the political arena, negotiations breakdown; Ernesto Samper: restoration of guerrilla political legitimacy, government guarantee of the security of the guerrilla representatives, no pre-condition of cease-fire, promise to dismantle paramilitaries; Peace is Possible in Colombia: two negotiating tables--paramilitary and guerrilla, need inclusion of civil society and other political actors, agrarin reform, incorporation of armed actors into the local structures of state and elective politics; necessity of third party mediators

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, UN General Assembly, December 9, 1948

1. Genocide, in peace or war is a crime under international law 2. committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group by killing members, causing serious bodily/mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures intended to prevent birth, and forcibly transferring children to another group 3. punishable: genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public inticement to commit genocide, attempt to commit, and complicity in genocide 4. persons shall be punished whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials, or private individuals 5. contracting parties will enact legislation to give effect to this convention and to provide effective penalties for the guilty 6. charged will be treated by a competent tribunal of the state in the territory of which the act was committed or by international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction 7. genocide will not be considered a political crime for the purpose of extradition

Colombia: Does Injustice Cause Violence? by Marc W. Chernick

1946-1958: La Vioencia (civil war between political parties); 1960s/1970s: low intensity guerrilla insurgency; continuity in geographic zones of violence; amnesty in peace making processes left illegal state and para-state institutions in tace and permitted serious human rights violations to escape justice; in the most violent regions, authority had been delegated to or usurped by illegal, private armed actors and state institutions and officials had overstepped the bounds of the legal use of force; cycle of violence and amnesties; failures to consolidate peace; parallel states: government and actors that believed they were excluded; revolutionary movements successfully inserted themselves into communities; criminalization of protest; spread of the war into the global, illicit narcotic production (which provided resources to armed actors); the drug trade fueled and transformed the existing conflict; REGIONAL nature is important; reflection of the reach of the state; substitution of private power; violent areas are predominantly rural; the presence of guerrilla movements channelled exclusionary conditions into armed rebellion; the presence of the military and wealthy landowners spurred the creation of paramilitary armies to fill the vaccuum of the absent state and to further concentrate private wealth, privilege and authority; state-directed terrorism; US over emphasis on narcotics; correlation between high rates of political violence, social violence and criminal violence; perdon y olvido; collapse of peace processes; how to reincorporate armed actors as political actors has been difficult; must establish truth about the past

Chapter 2 in Social Movements, Indigenous Politics and Democratization in Guatemala by Roddy Brett

1982-1985: national presidential elections and legislative elections and new constitution with elected civilian rule; internationally sponsored peace process; civil society did not take part in the democratic transition (but they did take part in the conflict transition); the Political transition occurred between 1982-1985, it saw an economic recession and instability, a decilne in guerrilla activity due to a decline in confidence, and tension between the private sector and the military; it was an elite-led process; there were underground popular organizations but there was no resurrection of civil society until after the democratic transition; democratization by accident; the Constitution of 1985 returned Guatemala to civilian rule whilst legalizing counterinsurgency measures; civil society reorganization and the beginning of national dialogue under Cerezo: 55.8% of eligible voters did not vote in the elections, the elections were fairly restrictive which did not represent broad sectors of the Guatemalan population; the ongoing armed conflict made the integration of insurgents into political life very unlikely; necessity of addressing the social causes of the conflict; Esquipulas II and the Framework Agreement for a Firm and Lasting Peace in Central America-->tied Guatemala to a regional peacekeeping initiative; Comision Nacional de Reconciliacion; The Grand National Dialogue was the first inclusion and engagement of civil actors in the peace process; demilitarization, demobilization of URNG, socio-economic issues, human rights and indigenous issues were all brought up; this Dialogue set the precedent for civil participation in the peace process; shift from paradigm of civil organizing: built on networks of activity initiated in the 1960s/1970s by Catholic liberation theology groups, politicized local communities and radicalized peasant groups; meeting betweein the CNR and URNG in Oslo, Norway, March 1990: put human rights, the military, political participation, social justice and the origins of the conflict on the agenda; Serrano Administration: saw a convergence of civil society--focus on the subordination of the military to a civilian authority and demanded accountability for human rights violations; auto-golpe due to the corruption and lack of legitimacy of the Serrano government, but this was not met with public support; elite settlements still continue to exclude popular and indigenous groups until the presidency of Ramiro de Leon Carpio and the formalization of civil society participation with La Asamblea de la Sociedad Civil; understandings of peace were not homogeneous, but were sectorally determined; La Asamblea gave the peace making process a representative nature but it also emphasized the differences between the private sector and the popular movements; participation of the left-wing in the 1995 election cycle; 29, December 1996 the conflict comes to an end

Peace and Democratization in Guatemala: Two Parallel Processes by Dinorah Azpuru

1986-1996: process of democratization and the process of making peace mutually influenced and reinforced one another; democracy starts with formal procedures and builds progressively in other areas until it reaches a point of stability; peace efforst were a consequence of the process of democratization; peace process would not have been possible without the parallel progress made in the process of democratization; transparency of the first elections; Esquipulas II: procedure for establishing a firm and lasting peace in Central America; amnesty declared for those involved in the armed conflict; comision nacional de reconciliacion; National Dialogue; reorganization of civil society; discussion of the substantive issues: human rights and violations thereof, erosion of Serrano's legitimacy, civil society needed/demanded space to discuss its opinon; army finally begins to restore law and constitutional order; UN intervention during impasse of de Leon Carpio's presidency; comprehensive agreement on human rights; presence of international observers was exceptionally crucial; discussion of structural issues such as the discrimination of indigenous peoples, the exclusion of the Maya from negotiations and the agrarian solution; presidential candidates were forced to take a position on the peace talks in their campaigns for presidency; URNG support for the elections in 1995 increased electoral participation; Arzu included all sectors of society in his administration; after the peace talks were finalized, there was an optimistic national climate, but there were also 200 commitments made by the government; end of conflict due to democratic opening, and changes in the chain of command of the army; importance of the international context; basic consensus was achieved among the differing sectors of society; disagreements were handled through legal channels; ghosts of the past; persistence of non-political violence; land tenure issues still; must continue with the implementation of changes; government must have an open dialogue with society; strengthening of key institutions in charge of public security and justice and the elimination of impunity will allow for better viability in the medium run

Chapter 3, The Guatemalan Military Project by Jennifer Schirmer

Beans and Bullets: feed the refugees and then put them in refugee camps; Inter-institutional coordinators and poles of development and services: social control over minimum daily needs; reorganization of production and rural life for security-qua-development goals and purposes; decentralized, integrated state apparatus that effectively utilized local and civilian bureaucracy; maintenance of military presence and counterinsurgency actions; Model Villages: high security areas to control population, integrate indigenous population into the antisubversive fight, indigenous reeducation and forced internment, designed for easy surveillance, disintegration of the economic, social and cultural bases of a community; to be uprooted from one's ancestral, sacred lands is at once a military strategy and a cultural trauma; Food for Work: put survicors to work and integrate them into development projects; substitute food for wages; creation of a class of well-off peasants who are favorable to the status quo, and as such, useful counterrevolutionary instruments for the army; the new civilian government was set up with many concessions to the military including protection from prosecution for human rights violations

Gender Based Violence Lecture 6

Claudina Velasquez; question of impunity, the weakness of the judicial system; perceptions and discrimination are also important; Defining Gender-Based Violence--World Bank: physical violence, emotional violence, sexual violence and economic violence; rooted in a woman's lack of power in relationships and in society in relation to men; 14-53% of women report experiencing violence at the hands of an intimate partner; Council of Europe: violence directed against a woman because she is a women or violence that affects women disproportionately; Gender-Based Violence in Latin America: lack of recognition of women as human beings; vioding their identity; human rights frameworks mean nothing without recognition; Midlarky: validation of violence due to the lack of consequences against perpetrators; the lack of recognition and impunity are mutually constituting and validating; women are targeted in more ways that are directly linked to their gender and sexual identity; sexual violence is varied, subject to change, depends on social and political contexts; Count Tilly's reward--compensation to soldiers; what is the function of the violence?; what is the link between past and present gender-based violence; male-domination of women is institutionally established; FEMINICIDE: the killing of a woman because she is a women; extreme manifestation of existing forms of violence against women; demonstrated connection between crime and the gender of the victim; institutionalized killing of women; a form of terrorism that defines gender lines; Causes: neoliberalism ( link between structural violence and direct violence; signal to women to go back to the private sphere, collapse political, social and economic spaces for women's action; aspect of the patriarchal structure of society); spectrum of sexual violence; based on the massive integration of women into the work force; shifting patters of violence: who are the perpetrators, who are the victims, what are the motivations, functions and objectives, what is the impact; violence is no longer ONLY political; is the killing of women today driven by the same forces as in the past?

Guatemala: Memory of Silence. Report for the Mission for Historical Clarification

Commission for Historical Clarification: 42,275 victims and 83% of them were Maya (only numbers based on fully registered victims); Historical roots of the armed conflict: economic, cultural, and social relations marked by exclusion, antagonism and conflict, protection of the economic interests of a privileged minority-->this economic structure enables the anti-democratic nature of the Guatemalan political tradition; the state abandoned its job as mediator between divergent social and economic interests; contribution of the legislature to the legal norms of exculsion; deficit of channels for constructively directing dissent; repression as a substitute for the law; structural injustice, closing of political spaces, racism, exclusionary nature of institutions and reluctance to promote substansive reforms; anticommunism and the US willingness to support military regimes; anticommunism led to criminal counterinsurgency; increasingly inclusive internal enemy; the state forces and paramilitary groups were responsible for 93% of violations of the period; disproportionately repressive response; 1978-1982 citizes from broad sectors of society participated in growing social mobilization and political opposition to continuing the country's established order; the state deliberately magnified the military threat of insurgency; Mayans identified as guerrilla allies--intentionally exaggerated by the state in order to eliminate present or future possibilities of people helping the insurgent project; massacres and scorched earth were an attempt to destroy the social base of the guerrillas but also to destroy cultural values that ensured cohesion and collective action in Mayan communities; militarization of the state; terror, climate of fear, extreme cruelty (resource used intentionally to produce and maintain the climate of terror); state terror was applied to make it clear that those who attempted to assert their rights ran the risk of death; forced complicity in violence to cause social disintegration; Civil Patrols-->civilians commit atrocities against their own neighbors; impunity; weakening and elimination of social organizations; massive forced displacement which ruptured social fabric; National Security Doctrine used as a justification for the atrocities committed by the state; disappearances, arbitraty executions, rape of women and death squads; denial of justice: couldn't try those responsible and coulnt protect those who were victimized; violation of international humanitarian law; faced with several options to combat insurgency, the state chose the one that caused the greatest loss of human life; killing of members, serious bodily/mental harm, deliberately subjected to living conditions calculated to bring about destruction--all acts committed with intent to destroy

Central America, Civil Society, and the 'Pink Tide': Democratization or de-Democratization? by Barry Cannon and Mo Hume

Pink Tide: emergence of the left and the left of center parties; what are the prospects for increased democratization; transitology sees democratization as a process, led by cost-benefit calculations on the part of key actors; democracy is not a unidirectional process; expansion and contraction of popular rule; must look at the interactiob between the state and civil society; national and global underlying structures; each state can be described with certain characteristics which give rise to particular political regimes and institutional features depend on said characteristics; globalization--the intensifying process of transnational interconnectedness; civil society v. uncivil society; state privileges some groups over others; Pearce: civil society is shaped by ideology, power configuration, class sectors and political context--it is not a fixed entity; failures of neoliberalism to deliver on promises; new search for equality to counteract the inequality and poverty left by neoliberalism; social movements emerge as counterbalance to social forces of oppression; new left is very constricted by contexts of international imperialism and extraction and elite blackmail; low-intensity democracies which do not really go past electoralism; high levels of crime and inability of the state to solve issues of inequality and poverty (self-perpetuating cycle); states enable violence through complicity, incapacity, direct involvement, omission and economic policies that further exacerbate economic inequalities; categories of people are sacrificed to become non-citizens; insecurity, corruption, parallel state; exclusion of the left at the beginning of the democratization process; new inclusion of the left in politics, ESPECIALLY in El Salvador; transition theory is very Eurocentric and that is why it is problematic

Peace in Colombia: Reality, Myth and Wishful Thinking by Lara Montesinos Coleman and Gearód ó Loingsigh

REASONS FOR OPTIMISM: 1. FARC's willingness to seek social change through negotiation 2. the international climate which is more conducive to peace talks and the support for peace 3. the internal economic outlook-->Colombia can finally fund negotiations, through there is a lack of money to come through on agreements and unwillingness to have agrarian reform 4. common ground on rural development and drugs--> would imply that the FARC gave up on land reform which has been their number one issue for the last 50 years, 77.6% of land is in 13.7% of the population 5. Unity within the FARC 6. anticorruption measures and obscuring state complicity-->this isn't very true--most peace processes engage in a rewriting of history to blur or erase the responsibility of the state; the historical responsibility implies that this would not all of a sudden change; CHALLENGES AND PROPOSALS: bandas criminales: people remobilizing from demobilized paramilitaries and maintaining control of resources and they were recycled in the form of the urban militia; institutionalization of impunity; need to give political guarantees and protection for demobilized FARC members; safeguard against a massacre like what happened to the Union Patriotica; how can the FARC trust the army or the state?; question of the state's ability to deliver meaningful land reforms; peasant groups have no direct input but they have clear demands; the interests of the people are not conducive to the interests of the state; participation within boundaries of pre-defined, neo-liberal policies which are not open to negotiation; state strategy to dampen expectations; we must avoid the demobilizing of wider society

Argentina's Lost Patrol, Chapter 5 by María José Moyano

Right-wing violence was an exclusively state-sponsored activity; the police frequently abetted and overlooked actions by the Peronist right; Peronist groups joined the paramilitary squads; there was a shared interest of being a check to the development of the left; the right had a proclivity toward conspiracy theories; National Security became the most important concern of the state (war against communism); conspiracy theories help to explain the mounting violence and brutality of the right-wing, and the tendency to broaden the definition of enemy; death squads and paramilitary violence increase during the Argentine Revolution; Violence durint the Peronist Interregnum: growing importance of youth sectors nad left-wing orientation, Orthodox (Peronist) Youth acted as a counterweight to the left but were very unrepresentative of the youth movement and had no concern for the interests of their constituents, lots of cross-membership between the Peronist right and the paramilitaries; AAA: active service policemen, dishonorably discharged former members, government personnel, death-lists of suspected left-wing sympathizers, elimination of the regime's opponents, weapon of the constitutionally elected governmet, paramilitary organization; The Dirty War: post-1976 military coup, disappearances on a national scale, against persons not property, country divided into 4 zones that coincided with the jurisdictions of the different Army corps, primary responsibility for counterinsurgency fell with the army, clandestine detention centers

Is Washington Losing Latin America? By Peter Hakim

after 9/11, Washington effectively lost interest in Latin America; in the region, support for Washington's policies has diminished; US is not seen as a dependable partner; LA has not completed the necessary socioeconomic reforms and continues to neglect economic inequalities and social tensions; US disappointment with development in the region; growth trap; low educational standars, low investment in technology and infrastructure, low savings rates, low levels of tax collection and politically divisive inequalities; democracy in the region is under stress; lackluster performance of public institutions tainted by corruption; is Hugo Chavez provoking instability in the region?; Chinese growing presence in Latin America-->challenge to US hemispheric interests; China provides an economic and political alternative to US hegemony; good relations with the US regardless; cries about human rights violations ring hollow because of US violations in Guantanamo Bay; US interests are often put before democracy promotion; Washington isn't seen as taking the region seriously; region will most likely remain peripheral to interests in the Middle East

Explaining the Left's Resurgence by M. R. Cleary

differences between the populist left and the social-democratic left; mostly just the moderate left persists; there is a new respect for the rule of law and a limited willingness to personalize and concentrate political power; the left: a political movement with historical antecedents in communist and socialist political parties, grassroots social movements, populist social organizations or other political forces that traditionally had antisystemic, revolutionary or transformative objectives; basis of support for the left: severe economic inequality, high levels of wealth and development, no redistribution of wealth; socioeconomic cleavage in which the median voter supports the redistribution of wealth (so the elites have to work harder to undermine political institutions to ensure this does not happen); inequality has translated into electoral success for the left almost exclusively in countries that historically have had organizational basis for mass mobilization; left no longer advocates violence, revolution or any other antisystemic approaches to resolving issues of social justice; protest is now used in conjunction with the electoral process rather than as an alternative; international and structural constraints on leftists after the conflicts; Neoliberalism: lack of committment to poverty alleviation policies, economic constraints; the same conditions that prevent the left from pursuing more radical economic policies are also responsible for the ability of the left to remain in power without provoking antisystemic behavior on the part of opposing political forces; constraints on the government prevent radical redistribution that would otherwise lead the wealthy to undermine the democratic process; the current leftward shift probably represents a fundamental and enduring transformation in the nature of political competition in LA; the left is perceived as being outside a system where the insiders are corrupt; inequality and social justice are better served by a moderate left in power than a more radical left that acts on the fringe of politics

How People View Democracy: Between Stability and Crisis in Latin America by Marta Lagos

tentative patterns of democratic commitment; democracy is suspended between stability and crisis; simultaneous support for democracy and authoritarianism; lots of indifference; erosion of support for institutions of representative democracy; LA is particularly sensitive to swings in economic conditions; if dissatisfaction persists over a long period of time it is indicative of a country's inability to solve problems; only 37% of people are satisfied; low levels of interpersonal trust; social networks have disbanded with liberalization of markets and economic modernization; barrier to the accumulation of social capital and development of civil society which could help to stabilize democracy in Latin America

The Dilemmas of Democracy in the Open Economy: Lessons from Latin America by Marcus J. Kurtz

more fundamental threat to democracy: underarticulation of societal interests, pervasive social atomization and political quiescence found in collective action problems that may undermine the efficacy of formal democratic institutions and ultimately regime legitimacy; question of the quality of democracy; political participation has become difficult with the economic hardships that neoliberalism has created; democracy requires the free and voluntary participation of individuals and groups in the selection of political leadership; privatization of interest groups reduces their incentives and no longer makes them accountable and representative; increased autonomy of political actors; increase of employment in the informal sector, displacement, unemployment and demobilization; decline in organizational and mobizational capacity of the state; failure of representation born of atomization and inability to form, articulate and sustain interests; demobilization with the consolidation of neoliberalism; reduction of organizational capacity of the working class; short-term effects hurt long-term prospects and benefits; no pattern of growth has emerged; even if neoliberalism is not responsible for problems, it has become associated with them; individual and collective political activity have gone down; content because they have a 'least worst' situation; how can institutions promote organization and participation?

Colombia Lecture 8

many claim influence from the Nicaaguan conflict; the conflict has a lot of accidental elements; economic growth, sociodemographic change, certain degree of electoral democracy combined with exclusion, violence and clientelity; land, rural issues and social exclusion are all problems; statelessness is really important to the nature of this conflict; are the causes still the same or has there been a change in causal motors over the 50 years the conflict has been going on; framed within the context of the Cold War originally but there is a shift and degradation of the conflict afterwards; the structural causes mutate, evolve and degrade; the FARC shifts its strategy to focus more on drug production and drug trafficking and kidnapping; the level and intensity of paramilitary activity is also unique to the Colombian conflict; the AUC was a part of the dirty war waged on the part of the Colombian state; the political economy had a direct and explicit relationship to the political violence; violence laid the foundations for neoliberalism; direct link to massacres and palm cultivations: massacre-->population displacement-->cultivation of African palm oil by the state and international companies; Hilberto Torres: trade unionist who was kidnapped by paramilitaries in 2001 so he came to the UK to talk against BP and Chiquita Banana who paid paramilitaries to kill trade unionists who act against their business policies; paramilitaries are very responsible for massacres and selective killings; permanent structural violence; country of contradictions defined by diverse, complex, and mutually reinforcing forms of political and criminal violence; low levels of public anger in response to violence; banality and trivialization of violence in Colombia; violence in Colombia has been permanent and endemic-->at its inception and middle, the violence was fundamentally political violence between conservative and liberal parties until the National Front which was a powersharing agreement between the two parties (in turn, it excluded all other parties and was fundamentally responsible for the emergence of the guerrilla because it closed all other political spaces; must think about patterns of the conflict; the paramilitaries were outsourced to defeat the FARC but mutated into something else (into a political and economic project)-->it developed economic interest and political power and infiltrated the Colombian political establishment; local political beings due to the absence of the state; the guerrilla groups are not fighting together on the same site and battles between groups are common; 81% of the victims of this conflict are civilians; armed actors implicate civil society both legally and illegally; neutrality is not possible; there is NO decent actor in this conflict; PATRIOTIC UNION: 1984-1985, formed in the context of negotiations , made of demobilized combatants and other diverse groups, it did well in the elections but this sparked fear in the elites and they committed political genocide, killing 4000 members.

Fragile Democracies by F. Colburn

new and old democracies are under stress, their legitimacy is being questioned, and their public support is increasingly fragile; declining public confidence in democracy, declining voter turnout in the elections, concentration of power in the executive; public dissatisfaction is not directed at the economic model but rather on corruption and ineptitude in government; legitimacy is based not on how they acquired power but what they do with it; need to improve the expectations of government and make them more reasonable; political parties are the weakest link in LA democracies because they are not institutionalized, they have no roots in society, they are not independent of ambitious leaders and are not democratic in their internal organization; 'cambio de camiseta'; the reform of political parties is stymied by a lack of political involvement on the part of many of the middle class, and the manages and professionals whose skills are sorely needed; too many conflicting ideas on how to best organize the state and society; absence of ideas; 'decent people don't get involved in politics'; the democracies of LA are hostage to economic trends and are vulnerable to economic shocks

Polyarchies and the (Un)Rule of Law in Latin America by G. O'Donnell

regularly scheduled competitive elections, individuals can freely create or join organizations, including political parties, there is freedom of expression, including a reasonable free press and the like; social conditions are not significant in determining if a country is democratic; connection between democracy and equality of citizens: carriers of rights and obligations that derive from their membership in a polity; equal right of choosing who will rule them; if socio-economic conditions affect political rights, then they must be included in analyses of democracy; righs and obligations must be universalistic; equalizing measures must be taken; implementation of a welfare state; shift from universalism to particularism to combat inequality; have political rights but the extension of civil rights is very incomplete; in Latin America: flaws in the existing law; application of the law is a means of repression--the privileged exempt themselves from the law; legacy of impunity and disregard for the the law; having rights is seen as a privilege; limited reach of the legal state, informal laws enacted by privatized power-->this supports extreme violence, the incompleteness of the state increased during times of democratization; politicians aren't really representative; polyarchical regime with regional regimes that are not polyarchical; the effectiveness of the rule of law entails certainty and accountability; relationship among legal rules are legally ruled; the government should be ruled by the law and subject to it; the rule of law should extend to all state agencies; enjoying citizenship fosters patterns of inequality that are less sharp, and socially and politically less crippling

On Civil Society by Lawrence Whitehead

"Before a democratic transition can begin, there must be a political community receptive to democratic aspirations. After regime change has taken place, the same community must respond to the new possibilities for political participation"; Social capital; civil society: a collection of associations, the space of uncovered human association whose members are free to enter or leave, to engage with or remain passive, as they please, independent sphere of voluntary association, goverened by autonomy and mutual respect; analysis of the state of nature shows the indispensability of social structure and political order and therefore necessitates civil society; civil society is indispensible to a stable and vital democracy (Tocqueville); PHILIPPE SCHMITTER: civil society is a set or system of self-organized intermediary groups that are relatively independent of public authorities and private units, are capable of deliberating about and taking collective action, do not seek to replace state agents or private (re)producers, and agree to act within pre-established rules of a civil or legal nature ( in summary, they are characterized by dual autonomy, collective action, non-usurpation, and civility); incivility: antisocial forms of individualism and group organization, prevalent where claims to privilege and property are politically contestable-->those with abundant social capital and the densest associative life can also use it to defend their privileges and marginalize the less well-endowed; new democracies will only tend to work well if they can restrain such exclusionary tendencies and induce those with the most social capital to adopt a broader and longer term view of their civic engagement with national society as a whole; reversal to authoritarianism can be explained by weak or absent civil society where there is encroachments on dual autonomy which subverts capacity for deliberation and encourages usurpation and incivility; there also exist unintentional, non-political structural threats to civil society such as unemployment and criminality; "the stronger civil society is the better, even if it is inherently denser in some locations than others; only those forms of civil society that contribute to the consolidation of a high quality of political democracy are clearly desirable"-->any collective action that is not subversice and that does not fall outside the law is as legitimate as any other; rights are finally being asserted against the state; civil society stabilizes the rule of law, expands public spheres for autonomous communication and promotes a culture of tolerance

Insecurity and Violence as a New Power Relation in Latin America by Magaly Sanchez R.

"increasingly, states have had to resort to violence to maintain order or simply to justify their own legitimacy, as indicated by the growing presence of the military in the streets of Latin American cities"; democratic order comes with unpopular economic and fiscal policies and the turn to force; rising violence and growing insecurity suggest a new social disequilibrium and a progressive loss of control throughout Latin America; neoliberal policies generate high rates of inequality, exclusion, poverty and alienation which lead to violence which triggers more state coercion which encourages more violence; this leads to a slow but steady reemergence of authoritarianism; "rather than viewing violence as a personal deviation from societal norms, it is more appropriate to consider it a product of structural inequalities, a social phenomenon in which multiple actors resort to the use of violence uncer similar social circumstances and in mutually reinforcing ways, not as isolated individuals; structural violence of neoliberalism produces new expressions of violence; prevalence of kidnapping to extract money from the middle class; emergence of private security groups; many people lack a foreseeable future

War and Politics in Colombian Society by Gonzalo Sánchez G.

"war is the shortest road to politics"; 19th century civil wars were aremed conflict that expressed elite rivalries; many 'unfinished wars'; historically hierarchical mobilizations; involved the masses but were fundamentally elitest; war is politics' most efficacious instrument; elite pacts after the war reinforced structures of regional paternalistic and authoritarian rule; semiabsent nature of the state; flourishing mobilizations, struggles and protests between the civil wars and La Violencia; gaitanism: Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, populist, socialist leader, assassination on April 9, 1948; no space for politics so people resort to violence; nation of supporters rather than actors; during la violencia: shift from tyranny of exclusion to tyranny of consensus; frustrated revolution: everything was changed/uprooted in a single movement but without actually changing anything; secularization of Colombian society; the militarization of politics; the National Front; new conditions which allow new groups to adopt new visions of society; insurrectional violence; war began to replace political relations; permanent degradation of social and political confrontation; new forms of warfare target much broader swaths of the organized community; war of all against all; "in the exacerbation of these muktiple forms of cross violence, regardless of the logic that might be attributed to them, there can only be losers"

In Pursuit of the RIght to be Free from Violence: The Women's Movement and State Action in Uruguay by Niki Johnson

1980s/1990s, domestic violence became a focal point in the agenda for women's movements-->it was seen as a violation of women's rights; Uruguay saw the early concession of political and civil equality to women as well as many women-friendly policies; it was difficult for second wave women's movements to take place and be successful because it was difficult to persuade the political establishment that specific measures were required to ensure substantive equality for women; gained recognition in international arenas before national ones; violence against women was seen as an impediment to peace; attempt to break the traditional taboo surrouding violence against women; mutual constitution of women's rights issues on national and international levels: women's organizations reach out to the international sphere which then influences the national sphere, and the cycle continues; petition to the UN to include women's rights on the agenda of the World Conference; January 1992: UNC on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women-->gender-based violence is a form of discrimination which seriously violates women's ability to enjoy rights and freedoms on a basis of equality with men (Recommendation 19?); UN general assembly: gender violence has its basis in unequal gendered relations of power; UN-->the state is considered to condone violence if it doesn't do anything which makes the state accountable for domestic violence as a human rights violation; international mechanisms were used to create/establish a legal precedent of state's obligation; "in order for women to know and claim their rights, it was necessary for those rights to be defined in law"; gender-blindness of the legal system must be overcome

From the Banality of Violence to Real Terror: The Case of Colombia by Daniel Pécaut

1987-93 saw an increase in the random and targeted terrorism caused by drug traffickers and shady allies; connections between the different types of violence; social cleansing, politicla assassination and petty crime, youth and inter-gang warfare; corruption of all organizations and sectors of society; more porous boundaries between the violence because armed actors have acquired the potential to control the key economic and productive sectors of the national economy; guerrilla protection of drug production; pattern of vulnerability in society; violence is not viewed as something catastrophic; the drug economy actually helped to avoid balance of payments deficits and the regional 'lost decade'; self-protection and minimal reliance on th government; guerrilla organizations step in and satisfy the desire/need for law and order; armed clientelism; terroroty is completely tied up with the activities of the armed protagonists; 'protection' as a means of waging war; massacres and conflict surround areas of territorial contestation; heightened feelings of insecurity; generalized distrust and the rule of silence; corruption; public opinon is constantly facing an attack--> "win the hearts and minds"; declining value attached to political life; multifaceted game between armed actors and civilians; memories of La Violencia; violence has become a norm in politics; the goals of the violence have changed; civil rights and political citizenship are in jeopardy; fragmentation and disjointedness

Chapter 3 in Encounters with Violence in Latin America by Caroline O. N. Moser and Cathy McIlwaine

COLOMBIA: lasting and extensive impact of La Violencia; 2 million rural peasants and farmers were displaced; internal migration; shantytowns and slums; increase in the actors and the people affected; "this multiplicity of violence has been allowed to flourish in the context of widespread impunity"; widespread impunity demonstrates the failure of the state to enforce its sovereignty and the rule of law, and in turn, breeds widespread fear and insecurity; GUATEMALA: increase in gendered violence; civil self-defense patrols militarized the rural part of the country; contemporary crime and violence affects urban areas that were previously relatively immune from the worst of the civil war; lots of impunity; OVERALL: insecurity and violence; violence represents over half of the problems that people face; "A ubiquitous problem in both countries was intra-family violence that was often perceived to underpin other types of violence and related problems"; isolation within communities and unwillingness to help those around them; deterioration of social fabric and social capital; area stigma; police station is feared most; negative attitudes toward public security

From Civil War to 'Civil Society': Has the end of the Cold War brought Peace to Central America? By Jenny Pearce

Central America was the principal theater of the 'Second Cold War'; Reagan wanted to turn back the tide of communism in the US backyard; human rights abuses made it harder for the US to send military support; Esquipulas II: paved the way for political solutions to the civil war; the US loses interest in Central America when it realizes that the leftist groups will not defeat the right-wing governments and ideologies; POSITIVE V. NEGATIVE PEACE-->no longer at war, but definitely not peaceful; "the culture of violence embedded in society and lack of respect for human life are strongly present in postwar Central America"; large percentage of people living in poverty; uneven societal impact of the war; growth in landlessness and poverty; militarization of the region with the help of the US; political actions hurt economic conditions even more; mobilization of previously inactive members of society; collectivities among the population were positively encouraged and legitimized; proliferation of autonomous institutions; EL SALVADOR: economic adjustment, stabilization and renewed growht, conflict betwen peace and economic growth, 'peace conditionality'-->IFIs refuse to relax fiscal discipline at the beginning of the reconstrucion process, erosion of conditions for peaceful development, national elites shift the burden of financing the peace process onto the international community, unsustainable economic growth due to the remittance flow from the US, need to reform the coercive apparatus of the state, judicial reform, lack of confidence in institutions; NICARAGUA: economic adjustment and removal of Sandinismo weremuch more important to the IFIs than promoting coherent social policies and national development strategies, the Sandinistas played a role in ensuring the governability of post-war Nicaragua, property issues were a huge source of conflict, restrictions on the army, necessity of social policies to ameliorate social violence

Chapter 4, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit by Virginia Garrand-Burnett

Fusiles y Frijoles: aggressive plan of pacification; PAAC eliminated guerrillas b destroying access to the general population as a base of support and, at least theoretically, to provide a safe-haven for pro-government campesinos; punish the guilty and reward the innocent; Rios Montt rationalized the policy of mass killing to the extent that it produced a decisive victory for the army; Lucas, not Montt, initiated the scorched earth policy; decline of military violence in 1983 reflects the success of the military stratefy and the total annihilation of the guerrillas; Finca San Fransisco: massacre on July 17, 1982; systematic rape and murder of all the women, mutilation of the children, killed 300+ people one-by-one; all victims and perpetrators were indigenous (likely due to the civil defense patrols); scorched earth: the obliteration not only of homes and possessions, but also the very landscape of place and belonging; Civil Defense Patrols: civil militias manned by male villagers who served on a mandatory rotational basis; self-policing of indigenous villages; national unity at the expense of indigenous community and identity (the sadness and anxiety brought about by intercommunity violence would become permanent problems); autogenocide: based on state/authority ability to manufacture difference, but it is the genocide of one's own people (not a legitimate explanation); women were more likely to die in massacres than in selective killings; left the countryside relatively devoid of men; double marginalization of widows: they need relief, BUT what if they WERE married to a guerrilla?; importance of the government manipulation of perceived differences within and between communities; conscription of young Mayan men--> once you break his customs the indian is very easy to discipline

Introduction and Chapter 1 in Social Movements, Indigenous Politics and Democratization in Guatemala by Roddy Brett

Guatemalan indigenous make up the majority of the population; income distribution follows an ethnic bias; social exclusion and conflict over land distribution; marginalization, social and economic exclusion is manifest in all areas of social life; must look at how and why civil actors mobilized collectively during the democratic transition in Guatemala, what impact did such collective action have on democratization and how did it evolve as democratization advanced?; National INdigenous and Peasant Coodination Group, Defensoria Maya (examples of civic groups for the advancement and protection of indigenous rights); platforms include: human rights and the rule of law, economic rights and agrarian issues, indiguenous and cultural rights; factors framing the different political options available: return to civilian government in 1986, internationalized peace process post-1987, regional shift toward democratization, and increasing visibility and mobilization of organized networks of indigenous actors; civil society: the space of social interaction between the individual and the state--it has a historically contingent formation that evolves over time; civil society in Guatemala wanted a restoration and promotion of a wide spectrum of rights, especially after the internal conflict; politics of identity: redefine cultural norms, individual and collective identities and appropriate social roles; politics of inclusion: democratizing and expanding political society; post-Cold War saw a waning political efficacy of class as a rationale for collective action-->needed alternative collective ways of doing politics-->actors emerged with platforms oriented toward the extension and consolidation of democracy; victims of political repression began to organize collectively; movements begin to broaden their definitions of human rights away from demands based predominantly upon universal-individual human rights for more specific rights (differentiated rights); collective action is contentions when it is used by people who lack regular access to institutions; social movements formed in direct response to the authoritarian state: closure of channels of political participation, lack of state services, state-sponsored political violence, and problems of negotiating with the state; "social movements and revolutions are shaped by the broader set of political constraints and opportunities unique to the national context in which they are embedded"; collective frames of action: communication, common symbols (crucial that the movement chooses symbols that reflect beliefs), culture is created and challenged by movements; masterframe: provides a framework for others to build upon or broaden

Guerrillas and Generals: The Dirty War in Argentina, Chapter 7 by Paul H. Levvis

Guerrilla conquest of liberated zones; unruly labor movement; government wanted total control of all sectors of the economy; hyperinflation; strikes which became inceasingly more confrontational, due to dire economic status; subversive organizations looking to capitalize on worker's growing discontent; military non-intervention policy is challenged during this time and impatience undermines the professionalist position of the military; enabling decree passed on February 5, 1975; TUCUMAN: good hiding place for the guerrillas and also allowed them to even the playing field with the army, complete guerrilla control of 1/3 of the territory by the time the army arrived, army's only advantages were numbers and helicopters, so the army decided to uproot the support system of the guerrillas (winning the hearts and minds of the civilians); overwhelming, pitiless force, most people were very afraid, and that is why they cooperated; successful plan to focus on the support system of the guerrillas

Chapter 2, The Guatemalan Military Project by Jennifer Schirmer

March 23, 1982: Guatemalan coup; 5-part army strategy: increase the number of soldiers, campaign of pacification, civil affairs companies to organize civil patrols and concentral refugees into model villages, expansion of legal justification of counterinsugenct through expanded decree laws, secret tribunals and media censorship, and a campaign of psychological warfare to win popular support for the army; "Beans and Bullets"; development of Guatemala to bring public support for the military; indiscriminate repression grew out of mix of repression and good works; most civic action was accused of being communist; post-1982 coup, both guerrilla and government seek to win over the indigenous population; each massacre on the part of the state resulted in hundreds of recruits moving into the guerrilla camp to protect themselves from the army; revolution was poverty-induced not communist-induced; prolonged popular war; Pacification Campaign: scorched earth, separage and isolate insurgents from the civilian population, "the searing contradiction of scorched-earth warfare is that in order to accomplish the separaton, certain areas are targetted for massive killings: that is, the military must treat the civilians they are to rescue as though they are combatants"-->it was primarily the indigenous population in the most highly active guerrilla zones that was targeted; centralized and highly coordinated system of command for an intensification of the massacre campaign and decentralization in terms of how strategy is to be implmented at the local level; saturate the area with patrols after the scorched earth campaigns; attempt to get the guerrillas and the civilians to start pointing fingers; "given the concentration of troops and resources at each operation, and the lack of any substantial self-defense in these communities, these actions (genocide, and massacres) resulted less in confrontation with the guerrillas and more in systematic massacre of the civilian population"; Plan of Action in Areas of Conflict (PAAC)-->how the army drew the indigenous out of hiding, forcibly recruited peasants; indigenous suffered because they were placed between the two armies

The Cold War that Didn't End: Paramilitary Modernization in Medellín, Colombia by Forrest Hylton

Medellin emphasizes progress and modernization; Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel; during the conflict, Medellin remained an oasis of peaceful capitalist productivity; worsening land conditions led to worsening poverty; expansion of urban slums due to elite refusal for agrarian reform; young, jobless, reasonably well-educated proletariat added an insurgent edge to mobilization; contraband entrepreneurs; cocaine created more jobs in both the licit and illicit economies; wealth redistributed through clientelism, patronage and corruption; money laundering; cocaine money helped finance infrastructural projects which caused a real estate and construction boom; recruiting of private armies for protection from the guerrillas; Pablo Escobar saga with extradition; urban warfare: specialization, concentration and professionalization of youth gangs; state repression caused the strengthening of armed groupings of the left; huge amounts of US military aid; "fusion of politics, property and organized crime, reflected in the paramilitary grip over security for capital investment, links the city's bad old days to its good new ones"; parcelized sovereignty; attempt to projet a vibrant city taking its place as a business hub and tourist destination; nationalized model of narcotics-based economy; "neoliberalism in extremis in which private economic-political power supplants the state in the form of a parastate"; the essence of the crisis is based on a drive by aggressive ultra-conservatives to harden the established order

Democracies without Citizenship: Injustice for All by Paulo Sergio Pinneiro

Official Violence continues in new democracies; there is a gap between the letter of the law and law enforcement; failure of the state to consolidate monopoly over the means of coercion; democratic constitutionalism did little to eradicate authoritarian practices; law is being used as an instrument of oppression at the service of the wealthy and powerful; massive failures of the court system; officials that occupy city slums provide some people's only experience with authority and it is one of extortion, and illegal police repression; vigilantism

Chapter 2, Societies of Fear by Dirk Kruijt

Peru and Guatemala; the outcome of both wars was a massive slaughtering of the indigenous population; they were stigmatized by international political isolaton; PERU: cause of the development of guerrilla movements had deep roots in the underdeveloped economy and society of Peru; Velasco years worked on the prevention of guerrilla mobilization through good governance-->nation building through development, reassociate the already organized and organize the marginalized; Shining Path: Ayacucho region of poverty, illiteracy, exploitation and underdevelopment, witheld land reform; Abimael Guzman; Maoist splinter group, cell-structure, strong roots in the peasantry, semi-clandestine for 15 years before the armed struggle; presidential distrust of the army allowed sustained growth of the guerrilla movement because there was no strong oppositional force; destruction of the public sector's infrastructure and the monopoly of power; coca/cocaine trafficking provided endless resources; refusal of the government to see the Shining Path as a legitimate threat; personal cult around Guzman; Belaunde was more preoccupied with controlling the military than he was with counter-insurgency; Quechua population was assumed to be subversive and was heavily targeted; creation of peasant self-defense organizations against the SP (rondas campesinas); Alberto Fujimori--recognition of paramilitary groups; GUATEMALA: permanent low-intensity warfare; coup against Jacobo Arbenz; replaced a government that had given hope to the indigenous people of the country, that had initiated much needed land reform, and that had produced a timid presence in the countryside; creation of a society of fear and the threat of a communist overthrow as a pretext; links between civilian and military functions in underdeveloped and indigenous regions which was reinforced by military civic acion programs; machinery of control, persecution, oppression and murder-->this was aimed against the communist threat of the guerrilla but expanded to anyone who could or would support the guerrilla; rather than reassess counterinsurgency tactics, the government simply intensified them; increase of conscripted men, expansion and consolidation of the system of paramilitary civilian defense forces, and the reinitiation of civic action plans of development

Political Challenge in Latin America: Rebellion and Collective Protest in an Era of Democratization by Cristina Schatzman

Revolutionary movements require a patrimonial government to succeed; nonviolent political protest flourishes in democratic regimes; rebellion does not equal revolution but it is a viable threat to the state because it induces change but not challenge to the sovereignty of the state; nes democratic transitions should put an end to closed authoritarian regimes; political challenge: an act of provocation by a mobilized sector of society to the ruling regime with the intention of promoting change; nonviolent and violent political challenge; measures of political challenge or collective protest: assassinations, guerrilla warfare, riots, rebellion, general strikes, antigovernmental demonstrations; repression is highly significant

Democracy and Governance in Conflict and Post War Latin America: A Quantitative Assessment by Dinorah Azpuru

The current wave of democracy is the most durable and widespread; they bring former combatants into political life; Linz and Stepan argue that they democracies have legitimacy when political competitors regard democracy as the only viable framewrfk for governing their society and advancing their own interests; have they built capable states which foster political and social inclusion and deliver the basic functions of a state; a country can be an electoral democracy and a failed state; importance of voice and accountability, range of ideologies allowed to compete for power, government effectiveness

Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America by Terry Lynn Karl

The new democratic wave hapened tangent to the economic recession of the 1980s; democracy: a set of institutions that permist the entire adult population to act as citizens by choosing their leading decision makers in fair, competitive and regularly scheduled elections which are held in the context of the rule of law, guarantees for political freedom and limited military perogatives-->contestation, participation, accountability and civilian military; focus mostly on political democracy not so much economic and social; are there preconditions to democracy: degree of wealth/capitalist development, political culture (a system of beliefs and values in which political action is embedded and given meaning), specific domestic historical conditions and configurations; are the perceived conditions actually outcomes of democracy?; importance of uncertainty during transitions; absence of predictable rules of the game: regime consolidation occurs when actors accept some set of formal rules to the game (or informal understandings); modes of transition to democracy: overt force v. compromise, reform, revolution, imposition, pact, most common is the transition from above; most democracies are constantly threatened by a military coup; conditions which allow short run survival may inhibit growth in other areas; trade off between political democracy and equity

Living in Revolutionary Time: Coming to Terms with the Violence of Latin America's Long Cold War by Greg Grandin

acceleration of the state's capacity to repress; omnipresent counterinsurgent infrastructure; US monopoly on security aid; repression driven by a reaction to the democratization of the region's status hierarchy; 1960/1970s--> violence as a byproduct of either social transformation or the dynamics of domination and resistance; state repression is a reflex during crisis and social violence is due to weak government laws an institutions; Century of Revolution was a distinct historical period; violence generated between the established sovereign state and the society of incumbent elites and the insurgent classes/groups driven by leaders with innovative world view; historicize political violence: examine the specific chronology of crisis--how actions are interpreted through ideology and sentiment and how this affects polarization; explore active relation between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence: counterrevolutionary is less vocal until the cold war where it grew as the revolutionary threat refused to disappear; acknowledge the dynamic nature of counterrevolution: ability to draw in new political actors and ability to revitalize its worldview in order to meet the challenge of revolutionary times, autonomy of the military as an institution, bureaucratic authoritarianism, failure of ISI paved the way for the military regimes of the 1970s, military embodied values and traditions of the upper class but allowed middle class entry; growth of the Latin American New Right (communism and socialism); how dynamics of conflict played out on an international field of power: military intervention, containment policies, support to coups against right-wing governments, extension of the Cold War into LA regional politics; state formation via domestic counterinsurgency

Guerrillas and Generals: The Dirty War in Argentina, Chapter 14 by Paul H. Levvis

after the dirty war--attempt to apply same standards of guilt to anyone who had operational responsibilities for any actions-->this was a direct challenge to armed services (denying them impunity); Operation Dignity: army revolt because of persecution by the government and the courts, it was aimed at army leadership who were failing to protect the institution-->result was that many concessions were made to the army and to persecuted generals; Colonel Rico--becomes isolated because of his involvement/organization of the revolt; carapintadas; Colonel Mohammed Ali Seineldin as the new army leader?; La Tablada: Alfonsin refused to pardon the military and junta leaders but there were still growing leftist tendencies and they attacked an army truck by La Tablada so a new movement within the Argentine army grew which supported Rico and Seineldin; The Final Carapintada Revolt: Carlos Sacil Menem comes to the presidency with the context of riots due to failing economic system, he pardons and gives anmesty to guerrilla leaders as well as military leaders (with the exception of EXTRAORDINARILY bad offenses) but the new army leader he appoints is still at odds with the carapintadas-->Menem responds with a hard counterattack to the carapintadas; No reconciliation--more pardons for the violent actors of the dirty war; Madres respond with huge demonstrations; civic death--did not declare the leaders innocent, only lifted criminal penalties; greater concern for the economy than for human rights; the impatience with gradual solutions saw old proceso officers elected into government; the 1997 case called for a repeal of pardoning laws because Swiss Bank Accounts were found with leaders' names; Because many junior officers were not penalized, they are now senior officers in the army

Chapter 2, Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala by Linda Green

altiplano: experienced the degrading underside of capitalist economic relations shored up by a repressive state apparatus; grinding poverty without the most basic social services; Modern Mayas are often characterized in pejorative terms by white elites and ladinos; they are seen as a distinct culture which is an obstacle to western development; blame-the-victim ideology defines the problems of poverty and underdevelopment as intrinsic to Mayan culture; racism is based on culture, not biology; construction of a ladino identity based on the othering of the Mayans and their subsequent marginalization; constant fear that the Mayans could take control of the country and challenge the structures of dominance; Mayan boys were often used as foot soldiers during the repression and this caused severe ruptures in family and community relations because it undermined their sense of trust and cooperation; rape and other violence against women was a gendered way in which the military attacked the social fabric of family and community life; Cycles of exploitation: the Maya were a cheap, exploitable labor force, during agrarian land reform many were displaced and this made finding work difficult; failed promise of land reform was a contributing factor to the civil war; Geneaology of Community: community origins could be traced back to the pre-conquest period; shared territory symbolized shared loyalty; land was the material basis for social relations; the ways in which land was distributed and utilized were important to how the Mayas have understood and practiced mutual aid and obligations as well as to how these relations have been reshaped over time; government efforts to undercut pan-Indian sentiments by granting land to certain communities and not others; February 4, 1976: earthquake in the altiplano which was a catalyst for economic opportunities, politicla organizing and the rebuilding of a sense of cooperation and mutual support among many community members; the Green Revolution created a major confrontation between community and state interests but then yields began to decline and supply costs increased; December 29, 1996 Peace Accords was a political settlement even though the fighting ended in 1984; new political spaces for debate where civil society can make demands for development and democratization; The Accord on the Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples-->Mayas have still been largely left out of the descion making process

Wartime Sexual Violence in Guatemala and Peru by Michele L. Leiby

analysis of sexual violence perpetrated by state armed forces during the Guatemalan and Peruvian civil wars; complicity of the state in the perpetration of sexual violence; men comprise the majority of vicims of human rights abuse and are more likely to be targeted and fall victim to arbitrary execution, torture or death; "women are targeted more often in ways that are directly linked to their gender and sexual identity as bearers and protectors of a community's culture and future generations"; principal-agent relationships and loss of control due to goal variance (the motives of leaders and agents diverge and leadership's lack of information on subordinate's behavior); conditions of anonymity and permissiveness allow individuals to pursue private interest; Count Tilly's Reward; sexual violence can work towards weakening the opposition wihout directly engaging in official combat; spread fear and terror indiscriminately throughout the civilian population; "sexual violence is especially demoralizing, especially in societies with deeply help social mores about women's honor and sexual purity"; gathering intelligence on the opposition movement by using sexualized terror techniques; used as a part of genocide or ethnic cleansing; rape, sexual abuse, sexual torture, mutilation, forced pregnancy or abortion, forced prostitution, sexual slavery, sexual humiliation; necessary social services may be lacking which would prevent victims from reporting the crime; In Guatemala and Peru: rape is the most frequent form of abuse, most abuses committed by the state (and the military is the worst state offender); sexual violence in Guatemala was most often perpetrated during community sweeps and massacres (41%); sexual violence in Peru was most often committed when the victims were detained (52%); state complicity in the abuse; torture technique v. terror strategy; "Sexual violence in Peru appears to be deliberate and targeted--a tool for punishing political opponents and signaling a similar fate to potential recruits. In contrast, sexual violence in Guatemala served to quell dissent against the state, but did so through indiscriminate, mass terror"

Guerrillas and Generals: The Dirty War in Argentina, Chapter 10 by Paul H. Levvis

anyone stereotyped to be a leftist sympathizer was targetted; many assumed that no mistakes were made but now international bodies assume that most killed were actually innocent; many innocent were 'sucked up' because of their association with those assumed to be guilty; kidnappings often victimized more than just the direct target; some kidnappings were acts of revenge, no suspicion; TORTURE: secret detention centers (340 throughout the country), beatings, electric pods, really poor living conditions, psychological torture, many different justifications, even soldiers were uncomfortable with or in disgust of the torture practices, due obedience makes the act morally ambiguous, desensitization, hardly elicited information of immediate value. Evita Montonera newspaper claimed that torture is quite tolerable and resistance is no problem if there is ideological certainty, but in actuality, collaboration with the armed forces was the real cause of the total collapse of the guerrilla movements; death was the most common release from the clandestine prisons; the army would fake guerrilla battles with the police and put it in the newspaper to cover up mass graves; many were also dropped into the ocean on 'death flights'; basic annhilation of the guerrilla forces

Argentina's Lost Patrol, Chapter 6 by María José Moyano

armed struggle results from the pressure of the masses and accompaines the development of mass struggles; after a while the armed struggle strayed and the resulting extralegal response had a paralyzing effect on collective action; Alfonsin makes the argument that the armed struggle and state terrorism are two sides of the same coin; the condemnaion of the latter should extend to the former, wich preceeded it and justified it; tale of two demons; former guerrillas argue that their actions were legitimated by the fact that channels for legal political participation had been eliminated and therefore their actions must by analyzed within the context of Cordobazado which utilized armed struggle--their actions pale in comparison to the atrocities committed by the army; military clames that the decree which enabled Operation Independence (S 261?), due obedience and the fight against terrorism constituted a war and therefore justifies their actions; post-facto rationalizations; the war was not directed against the guerrillas but against society at large; dirty war was waged as a reaction to the levels of politicization and mobilization displayed by Argentine society in the 1973-1976 period; the two demons debate leaves out the government and civil society which can be argued to have been complicit in the actions; the armed struggle in Argentine society: radicalized civil society, glorified violence as an agent of social change, and was relatively supportive of the violence; an individual's evaluation of surrounding violence is inseparable from, and maybe determined by, the political context in which that individual lives; support for the guerrillas came from the fact that they acted against a repressive military; willingness to overlook was a direct consequence of militarization

Epilogue: Notes on Terror, Violence, Fear and Democracy by Edelberto Torres-Rivas

democracy is not irreversible; violence has arisen out of a long-established tradition; violence has been experience by the poor mostly (structural repression); frustration and fear produce permanently aggressive states of mind; state terrorism: the use, tolerance or threat of force by agents of the state, or its representatives, carried out in an organized manner and expressing itself directly or obliquely, practially or symbolically; state exceeds its legal capacity to use violence; rationalization of violence and harm inflicted; trivialization of horror due to politically inscure existence, the adaptations to the permanent presence of death, accostomation to living with extraordinary and abnormal conditions of pain and fear, insecurity and lack of confidence; transitions with fear are often incomplete, have lots of impunity of political violence; political democracy begins when the rules of the game of participation and electoral competition are accepted by all those taking part

A Headlong Run into the Future: Violence in a Guatemalan Indigenous Village in A Century of Revolution by Carlota Mcallister

bloodiest armed conflict; rapacious agrarian capitalism and systematic ladino oppression of Mayan majority; scorched earth campaign; two demons narrative: who is to blame, the guerrillas or the army?; Guatemalan indigenous mobilization seriously threatened the old order, including ladino racial privilege; The Guerrilla Army of the Poor and the Committee for Peasant Unity: claim that development initiatives had eliminated Mayan motivations for participating in the revolution; recognized poverty as a source of unrest and attempted to alleviate it; saw racial discrimination as distinct from class oppression; recognition of the relationship between poverty and indigeneity; concerned with the distinctiveness of indigenous grievances and wanted to make sure struggles were recognized as relevant to all revolutionaries as well; tensions between popular expectations for change and military and elite unwillingness to accommodate them were further exacerbated by the earthquake of Feb 4, 1976; CVC--> autonomous from EGP and profoundly symbolic; the CVC wove revolutionary temporality into the fabric of community life and eventually evolved into overt clashes with the government; total collapse of the Guatemalan regime's legitimacy with the Spanish Embassy Massacre on January 31, 1980; huge amounts of displaced people; most refugees took government amnesty but were forced to participate in civil armed patrols against the guerrillas; revolutionary sense of historical necessity of the violence; army overestimation of people's capacities; the army and the guerrilla can provide more authoritative accounts of the war but privileging these accounts over indigenous ones obscures the traces of the challenge el ochenta represented to such claims to authority; importance of the uncertainty that is characteristic of Chupolense accounts: violent rupture with the past, repressive functions of the guerrillas; the two demons narrative subscribes to a voluntarist model of revolution; 1980s insurgencies failed in spite of successful mobilization of indigenous support

On the State, Democratization and Some Conceptual Problems: A Latin American View with Glances at some Postcommunist Countries by Guillermo O'Donnell

breakdown of authoritarianism but not moving towards an institutionalized representative regime; cannot conflate the state with the state apparatus, the public sector or the aggregation of public bureaucracies; effectiveneess of the law must extend regularly across the territory and functional relations it regulates, otherwise citizens creat systems of local power; intense privatization due to fear and insecurity-->power circuits with rules inconsistent with national ones and the evaporation of the public dimension of the state; mixing of authoritarian and democratic forms of the state; various forms of discrimination and extensive poverty and their correlate, extreme disparity in the distribution of resources, go hand in hand with low intensity citizenship; states attempting to become more fiscally responsible has caused degradation of public services, falling salaries, increases of taxes and prices of public services; high and recurrent inflation, repreated failed structural reforms, increase in corruption, fragmentation of the state apparatus, lack of representation of interests, difficulties with democratic consolidation

Rethinking the Link Between Civil Society and Civil War: The Case of Colombia by Juliana Ramirez

civil society is an effective mechanism to enhance democracy and hold governments accountable for their actions; in civil war, civil society is challenged by violence; KALYVAS: variations of violence across time and space are a function of struggles between armed groups for territorial control, therefore, in areas where territorial control is being contested, violence increases in the form of more destructive methods--society characteristics vary according to territorial control; need a dialogue between the literature of civil society and the literature of civil war; transformation of civil wars into wars against civilians; territorial competition brings high levels of violence due to conflict between non-state actors; civil war can cause the polarization of civil society; organizations and projects erupt in response to the violence

Overview Lecture 1

conflict countries v. authoritarian countries; important to look at violence and the resistance to violence; most unequal region in the world; simultaneous transitions in Latin America: war to peace, authoritarianism to democracy, wartime economy to market economy, rife systematic impunity to rule of law, underdevelopment to some kind of development; consolidation of electoral regimes of civilian politics, political institutions and increased political participation BUT growing levels of social exclusion and violence in rural areas; for whom and for what purposes does democracy exist; certain limited citizenship rights accompanied by increasing levels of poverty, social exclusion and violence; Brown Zones: authoritarian enclaves and the persistence of conditions of authoritarianism; democratic deficits; violence remains even with the end of armed conflict and the overthrow of authoritarian regimes; statelessness: absence of the state or a very weak state, weak institutions and weak institutionality; problem of impunity; challenges in Latin America are often about challenges in reaching a consensus about the rules of the game and how to live in a democracy; embedded corruption--institutions often act for personal gain; at the momebt of transition, too many concessions were given to elite groups; short term concessions prevent any long term growth and deepening of democracy; invisible civil society groups are becoming key actors in regional politics; state violence: rational, logical, and strategic response to those who wanted to overthrow social/politica/economic orders

Introduction: Violence and Fear in Latin America by Dirk Kruijt and Kees Koonings

country leaders must share power--even with some invisible political actors; legacy of terror, violence and fear; societies of fear; formal democratization has moved forward in impressive ways, but the process has been permanently bedeviled by institutional confusion, political turmoil, conflicts and violence; violence is related to maintaining the traditional rural and oligarchic social order; violence also related to the problem of the modernization of the state and incorporation of the masses in politics; also related to the present-day difficultues of consolidating democratic stabilty, economic progress and social inclusion; traditional domination by the elites of the masses; clientelism; oligarchic alliances with the military; new pressure from organized popular sectors; politicized social violence (violence emplyed to gain acess to/secure political power); rise of populist regimes gave rise to military-civil dictatorships as a combative response because national objectives were threatened by communist populists; democratization of violence in Latin America; state inability to monopolize legitimate use of violence; governance voids due to the erosion of state legitimacy with the growth of democracy; although not directly conducive to violence, the social and political consequences of the process of informalization and social exclusion is the erosion of the legitimacy of the formal civil, political and public order; parallel institutions and the privatization of public institutions; mass production/mass consumption of violence; fear is the institutional, cultural and psychological repercussion of violence, it is a response to institutional destabilization, social exclusion, individual ambiguity and uncertainty; creation of an apparatus of systematic repression and a concomitant climate of fear; routinization allows people to live in a chronic state of fear with a facade of normality; importance of silence and secrecy

Born In Blood and Fire Lecture 2

crime is a development issue and not a security issue; young male (16-35) is the primary violent actor; Three cycles of violence: 1870-1930 (violence relating to maintaining the traditional rural oligarchical order), 1930-1970 ( relationship between violence and mass politics, violence deriving from challenges to oligarchic order, politicization of violence, Cold War), 1980-present (post-conflict violence, struggle to consolidate democratic stability, more inclusion, etc.); state-led violence: top-down, most egregious, most brutal, most systematic; Societies of Fear: state violence has had a paralyzing effect on civil society, closed down spaces, prevented the possibility of resistence, possibility of asserting agency is minimal; Violence is shaped by contingency and ambiguity: what opportunities does it open up?; tension between paralyzing impact and the fact that spaces for resistace have been consolidated; violence has a function; violence is so commonplace that it becomes trivial or banal; systematic violence; violence can be used instrumentally to spread fear and dissuade, weaken the opposition, punishment, elimination, intellingence gathering mechanism; Cold War: the military steps up as arbiter of national order, stability and progress in contrast with leftist growth; CAUSES OF VIOLENCE: insurgencies due to closure within the political system, socioeconomic exclusion, absence of state monopoly of the legitimate use of force, lack of state capacity, heightened political mobilization as challenges to oligarchy, state collaboration of counterinsurgency operations; US was a key acor: provision of finance, training, took advantage of the Cold War context

La Violencia: New Research, New Questions by Gonzalo Sánchez

democratic, civilian administration has been sustained through La Violencia; permanent and endemic warfare; Stages of Warfare: Civil Wars to balance the rivalries of the ruling class-->La Violencia which was a permanent state of crisis-->masses break into the political arena and ruling classes lose the orientation and management of ideology, and also political and military command; depersonalization of the conflict; old literature denounces the guerrillas and reflects elite ideology; testimonial literature which draws on the immediate experiences of people in their manifold social roles-->accounts by actors or victims of the events themselves; New literature poses debates about the origins of La Violencia; effects include the refeudalization of Colombia; Gaitanismo: anti-oligarchical movement; breakdown of traditional submissive mentality of the peasantry; shift from analysis of La Violencia as the product of particular political circumstances toward long-term views in which the conflict is regarded as a structural element of the political and social development of the country; origins of the FARC in La Violencia; necessity of distinguishing the regional variants of the conflict; the regional question is a national problem

From Genocide to Feminicide: Impunity and Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Guatemala by Victoria Sanford

crisis of feminicide and its omission of its responsibility to guarantee equal protection before the law to all its citizens; cost of impunity (legacy from the internal conflict as well); The Commission for Historical Clarification found that the state was responsible for acts of genocide against the Maya; genocide is a gendered atrocity because it has the intention to destroy a cultural group which includes the destruction of reproductive capacity; evolution from the selective killings of men to the massive massacres of men, women and children; POSTCONFLICT violence and feminicide: increase in homicides in general, but increase in percentage of homicides involving women; gang violence; killing of women becomes feminicide when: it is the killing of females by males because they are female; "A form of terrorism that functions to define gender lines, enact and bolster male dominance, and to render all women chronically and profoundly unsafe"; it exists because of the absence of guarantees to protect the rights of women; Claudina Isabel Velasquez Paiz: disappeared August 12, police did not file a missing person's report, discounting that she may be in danger, claiming she probably ran off with her boyfriend or that she was in a gang or a prostitute, and the authorities burned her clothes which would have been evidence in any other investigation around the world; did not follow ANY investigative protocol; Frameworks for understanding the killing of women in Guatemala: gangs. personal problems. passionate problems. robbery killings, drug trafficking, during rape, crossfire, suicides, carjacking victims, domestic violence leading to murder; no political will to stop the killing of women; attempt to return women to the private sphere; revictimization of families; perpetrators of sexual violence experienced impunity during the conflict, so why would that change once it ended?; Yakin Erturk: "connecting the violence of the past with the present Feminicide...imperative of prosecuting perpetrators of previous violent crimes against women as 'an important step in the fight against impunity, not only because the perpetrators would be brought to justice, but also because of the deterrent effect for future acts'"; connections between practices and discourses of violence in the past and present

Is the war ending? Premises and Hypotheses with which to view the conflict in Colombia by Javier Guerrero Barón

deepening of the armed conflict is likely; there is a consensus that great social inequality and instability give rise to a dynamic that confers legitimacy on revolutionary projects and violent alternatives; if there can be agreement over the objective causes then efforts should be made to reach agreement on the solutions; big business leaders are finally realizing that peace is good business; disagreement about the means of solving the conflict; seek solutions through revolutionary change or through reforms and democratic procedures; have not renounced violence as a means to achieve political objectives; no mass mobilization as a rejection of violence; the actors don't have to answer to constituents, so the violence continues; private mechanisms in defense of private interests; importance of indifference; no indication that any party is looking to move toward negotiations; compromises and sacrifices are necessary, but how much will they be willing to sacrifice; there are structurally intransigent sectors with the capacity to obstruct a negotiated politicla solution-->war furthers their interests which adds to the inertia of war; the tactical strength of the guerrilla diminishes the likelihood of negotiation; possibilities: containment or all out war, recognition of the unfinished Colombian revolution; the Colombian Civil War has become an international problem, and this will lead to the application of the concept of limited sovereignty to a solution of the internal conflict; less room for sovereignty, no capacity to resolve conflicts, intervention is necessary; increasingly ungovernable, growing fragmentation of power, could lead to a prolonged war with destructive effects for territorial integrity-->dismemberment of Colombia?; "Colombia is the result of a social, economic and political model that attempted to enter modernity without rejecting violence"

Armed Actors in the Colombian Conflict in Armed Actors: Organized Violence and State Failures in Latin America by Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt

deficient political administration, guerrilla consolidation, and the rise of paramilitaries between 1958-1990; The National Front (1958-74) enabled the armed forces to subordinate the liberal-democratic institutions shaped by the process of modern state formatione (because there was no longer any violence based on elite conflict); FARC (1964), ELN (1965), EPL (1969), M-19 (1974); national security was seen as more important than naitonal defense; indiscriminate use of the 'state of seige'; de facto abolition of the rule of law; proliferation of paramilitary organizations and of self-defense gropus under the control of narco-traffickers; Belisario Betancur (1982-86) inagurated the peace processes with the recognition of the political character of the guerrilla; the peace process was suspended under Virgilio Barco; there was an overall failure of the government to contain the guerrilla; focus on narco-terrorism; pattern of troubled negotiations; "The FARC and the ELN had initiated an exceptional campaign of repoliticization and legitimation through the control of local politics and administrative activities"-->subversive political infiltration; guerrilla levy on coca farmers and cocaine producers which allowed them to fund their operations unlike any other guerrilla groups in Latin America; Plan Colombia and the escalation of the war, 1998-2003: President Pastrana opened new peace efforts, but an increase in violence, the stagnation of the peace process and economic crisis led to a rapid deterioration of the government's image; government decisions were often made in reacive fashion; too much growth in paramilitaries; contradictory approaches to the different guerrilla groups; HUGE amounts of US financial aid; urbanization of the war; President Uribe?; AUC paramilitary group is put on the US and EU terrorist lists

What Democracy is...and is not by P. Schmitter and T. Karl

democracy does not consist of a single unique set of institutions; the specific form democracy takes is contingent upon a country's socioeconomic conditions as well as its entrenched state structures and policy practices; modern political democracy is a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for the actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competitiion and cooperation of the elected representatives; institutionalization of patterns and practices; importance of elective competition; during the intervals between elections, citizens can seek to influence public policy through a wide variety of other intermediaries; specific procedural norms must be followed and civic rights must be respected; control over government decisions about policy is constitutionally vested in elected officials; elected officials are chosen in frequent and fair elections; practically all adults have the right to vote, to run for elective offices in government; citizens have the right to express themselves without danger of severe punishment, to seek out alternative sources of information, to form relatively independent associations/organizations; cannot bar losers from taking office in the future; must respect the winner's right to make binding decisions; democratization will not necessarily bring in its wake economic growth, social peace, administrative efficiency, political harmony, free markets, or the end of ideology. Least of all will it bring about the end of history

Armed Actors, Organized Violence and State Failure in Latin America: A Survey of Issues and Arguments by Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt

democracy is about citizenship rights and the structures and mechanisms to put these into practice; Uncivil society: agents or groups that force their interest upon the public domain on the basis of coercion or violence, legitimate aspirations are jeopardized and the rule of law is shattered; state violence provokes/recruits non-state violence to do the dirty woek or to occupy the spaces created by the delegitimization of the legal order and the impunity that goes with it; expansion of legitimate security sectors and the official and unofficial functions became difficult to distinguish; expansion of legal violence into extra-legal violence in the name of law and order; vigilanteism; radicalization of social and political movements as a part of uncivil society; criminal organizations; fear and distrust; undermining of civil society and the emancipative struggles pursued within it; destroyed efforts of those pursuing a legitimate political role

Why the end of the Cold War doesn't matter: The US war of terror in Colombia by Doug Stokes

discontinuity with Cold War practices is assumed; assumption of the centrality of the Cold War in foreign policy decisions; world order characterized by long-term structural inequalities; mainstream view of US foregin policy during the Cold War focuses on an East/West dichotomy-->seen as formulated in response to the inherently hostile nature of the bipolar competition; containment strategy; military campaigns in third world countries were justified by containment; covert warfare and government destabilization; Chomsky's view of US foreign policy during the Cold War: North/South--> challenges the assumption that the USSR was inherently aggressive and threatening to Western security; US concern: not the containment of communism, but the extension and expansion of American capitalism; structural domination of the developing south; military-industrial complex created a justification for massive state interventionism; the Soviet threat was just a pretext for military interventionism; threat to US interests was any movement or party that threatened to end its access to resources; Chomsky claims continuities in the world order post-Cold War: US continues to fund and train developing world militaries; discontinuity thesis: the war on drugs; Chomsky's continuity thesis: war on left-wing rebels (there are right-wing paramilitary groups involved with the drug trade); inconsistency with empirical evidence and discourse; war on terror (even though they are fighting the guerrillas and not the paramilitaries who are responsible for 80% of human rights abuses); US complacency and encouragement with regards to the paramilitary problem; need stability geared toward US interests?

Twisted Maternalism: From Violence to Peace by C. Gentry

equation of women's participation in the political arena with peace and non-violence; political actions are defined by their expected gender role as a mother; belief that women think and act differently because of their socio-biological role as mother; "whether or not politically active women are mothers or claim their motherhood, a motherhood ideal is often applied to them anyway"; continuation of the division between private and public spheres; maternal instinct rather than intelligence; "within certain contexts, women's gendered role as mother is claimed by the naiton, movement or state to symbolize the collectivity"-->other people's claim on her socio-biological role; "women are mothers of the nation, but not necessarily participants in the nation in their own right"; sexual division of labor disappears in war when there is no clear differentiation between the battle front and the home frtont; female self-martyr: due to gendered-humiliation-->they have been marginalized, divorced, ridiculed, isolated and influenced by the death and/or humiliation of a male relative

Getting Away with Murder: Guatemala's Failure to Protect Women and Rodi Alvaro's Quest for Safety by Angelica Chazaro, Jennifer Casey and Katherine Ruhl

failure to provide meaningful protection for women who are victims of violence; denial of protection even in the United States; "The Guatemalan feminicides constitute the clearest manifestation of the lack of protection from life-threatening violence Guatemalan women suffer; Claudina Velazquez; individual injustice engendered by each feminicide; terrible inadequacies in the investigative and prosecutorial processes; high number of murders involving sexual violence; ascribe blame to different societal factors or agents; domestic violence, backlash against women in the public sphere, overall increase in the general crime rate, gangs and organized crime, etc; 1/3 of all murders are the consequence of domestic violence; too much focus on the character of the victim and not enough on the motives of the murderer; legacy of government-sanctioned violence against women-->women suffered violence unique to their gender, use of sexual violence as a weapon; legal systems sanction gender-based discrimination; civil laws allow husbangs to prevent their wives from working outside the home and confine the women to the private sector; criminal laws treat domestic violence as a minor offense, there are no criminal penalties for abusers, insufficient protections to victims; authorities commit gender discrimination; government actors themselves were responsible for a majority of the violence against women during the war and have been implicatd as perpetrators of some of the feminicides; not a huge priority in the context of gangs and drug trafficking

No More Killings! Women respond to femicide in Central America by Marina Prieto-Carrón, Marilyn Thomson and Mary Macdonald

femicide emerged in Ciudad Juarez on the Mexico-US border; murder of women because they are women; carried out by partners or relatives but also by men who are a part of criminal activities; mutilated corpses being used as a weapon to spread terror among women; extreme form of gender-based violence; linked to deeply entrenched gender inequality and discrimination, economic disempowerment and aggressive or machismo masculinity; backlash against empowered women; failure to investigate the murders; most murdered women are from marginalized sectors of society--prostitutes, maquila workers and members of the maras (common media representations); "indeed, young, poor women working on the margins of legality are in a very vulnerable situation and are more likely to be attacked"; violence exacerbated by organized crime; culture of violence; gangs, domestic violence gone too far, act of revenge agaisnt a family membet, related to drugs, human trafficking networks; femicides are the tip of the iceberg of cycles of gender-based aggression that patriarchal societies impose on women in the private and public spheres; increase in domestic violence in low-income neighborhoods; "women from poor and marginalized communities are often constrained by traditional attitudes that subordinate them within the family and limit their mobility"; unemployment exacerbates domestic violence because it may undermine the male's sense of masculinity to be unable to provide for the household; most jobs available to women are low-paid and exploitative; MIGRATION; backlash against women who have stepped outside the safe domestic sphere; continuum of violence; seen as acceptable; ignored by public order systems; "impunity facilitates further murders and, in a cultural climate where violence is commonplace, men kill women because they can"; denial that murders are systematic and part of greater structural issues rather than simply random and spontaneous; claim they don't have anything to do with unequal gender relations; failure to investigate is indicative of discrimination; poverty and racial discrimination; lots of women's organizations in response

Guatemala's Crossroads: Democratization of Violence and Second Chances by Julie López

formation of the National Civilian Police but the growing gang problem widened security needs and police power; large problem of organized crime; "they thrive on government corruption at a low or mid-management level, but do not necessarily rely upon open cooperation from authorities in top positions"; importance of territorial control in organized crime; criminal activity required the complicity of the armed forces; need to replenish the military after conflict meant losing quality control and graduating/promoting people before they were ready; impunity due to indirect or direct links to the state; no provision of a better life for ex-army combatants after they returned home so they returned to civilian lide with no education, no employable skills and very few opportunities; peace accords called for reforms that could not feasibly be met in the time frame or with the resources the government had; lack of internal controls within the security forces of the state; did the inverted order of the elections before the peace process allow for a smoother transition from military to civilian government or did it facilitate the survival of military influence in spite of a civilian administration; infiltration of organized crime; illegal border crossings due to lack of infrastructure; DTOs contribute to gang (territorial) violence; "there is a strong sense amongst some in Guatemala that human rights violations are an unfortunate but necessary element of fighting crime, and especially organized crime"; endemic violence; impunity at 98% in Guatemala; necessity of a more comprehensive anti-poverty strategy--educational and employment opportunities to people who who otherwise opt for joining criminal gangs

A Historical Perspective on Counterinsurgency and the 'War on Drugs' in Colombia by Marco Palacios

from the mid-80s onward, narco-trafficking began to impel mafia-driven modernization, further corrupt political practices and accentuate the state's secular weakness; guerrilla and paramilitary help with narco-trafficking; weak state that has tolerated and encouraged the political suprema y of a complex system based on latifundism and clientelism and its related ideological dogmas; Colombia has modernized in a peculiar fashion with economic growth, sociodemographic change and chaotic urbanization, both constitutionalism and corruption, both social exclusion and social mobility, both legality and violence, both electoral and clientelistic democracy; new constitution in 1991; move to a surreptitious clientelism that intensified the territorial fragmentation of the state and brought to light discontinuities in the chain of command of public adminiztration and the continual interference of opportunistic factions; Plan Colombia: strengthen Colombia to fight the war on drugs; troublesome unification of the war on drugs with the war on terrorism; limits placed on national sovereignty; crucial US military aid; volatile legitimacy of the peace process; state has lacked a policy for peace--it has been more linked to the electoral cycle; what about the paramilitaries; Band Aid Peace: no minimal social reforms, minimal benefits for the demobilized, territorial power vaccuums remain; 'hopes and reversals' of the peace negotiation process; Uribe was an enemy of the unsustainable peace process so he increased the military campaign and public opinion went up; unilateral cease-fire of the paramilitaries in December 2002; increasing incentives to engage and participate in electoral politics; human rights violations are not being addressed; nuevas bandas criminales (gangs of demobilized paramilitaries)

Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction by Adam Jones

genocide in history-->the records are ambiguous and undependable as many past accounts are aimed to praise the writer's patron; importance of in-group and out-group beliefs; genocidal themes in the first 5 books of the old testament; naming genocide-->Raphael Lemkin: crime without a name until WW2, described genocide in the context of Nazi-occupied territories and their actions; intentional destruction of national groups on the basis of their collective identity; coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups with the aim of anhilating the groups themselves; to destroy or attempt to destroy a culture is a special kind of crime because culture is the unit of collective memory, whereby the legacies of the dead can be kept alive; UN Convention helps to define genocide as well; sees it as a crime under international law; acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group; killing, causing serious bodily/mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent birth, forcibly transferring children; defining and binding of genocide so as to properly punish it and recognize it; need a distinct definition to properly penalize but also cannot rule out too many actions that should be included; importance of target groups being identified by perpetrators; does scale matter?; strategies: coordinated plans of different actions, killing elites, elimination of national culture and religious life, break in the link of reproduction and socialization; intent to destroy, systematic, deliberate and organized; widespread or systematic campaign; genocidal continuum; group identity is often imposed by perpetrators rather than claimed by targets; genocide is not necessarily preordained but will come out of a concoction or matrix of ingredience and contingencies...only crystallizing in specific and usually quite extraordinary circumstances of acute state and societal crisis; the question of genocidal intent: intent is not the same as motive, there must be a direct and manifest connection between act and outcome; a person has intent where...in relation to conduct, that person means to cause that consequence or is aware that it will occur in the ordinary course of events

Regime Legacies and Democratization: Explaining Variance in the Level of Democracy in Latin America, 1978-2004 by Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán

low-quality democracies; Chiles, Costa Rica and Uruguay have the highest levels of democracy but there is a large gap between them and the rest of the region; illiberal democracies or hybrid regimes; stability in the level of democracy-->this also means that democracies aren't improving even though they aren't regressing; ; Freedom House; level of development, economic performance, natural resource dependence, size of working class, party system institutionalization, multiparty systems, measure of presidential powers, regional political environment; importance of democratic history; importance of ethnic discrimination, not ethnic fractionalization; once a country or region has started down a track, the costs of reversal are very high; the sequence of events is very decisive; the past conditions the possibility for democratization in the present; regime legacy is a less bounded, less deterministic version of path dependence; An early history of democracy favored the building of formal institutions such as party systems, courts, and other agents of intrastate accountability that are favorable to higher levels of democracy in the contemporary period

Contested Meanings and Conflicting Imperatives: A Conceptual Analysis of Genocide by Scott Strauss

genocide makes up a huge range of phenomena; genocide is applied so discrepantly, to such heterogeneous phenomena, because the concept embodies several conflicting imperatives and has a strong European prototype-->the Nazi Holocaust is the primary Western example; genocide is assumed to be the apex of human evil; it has empirical, moral, legal and political aspects; without agreeing on what genocide is, scholars cannot develop plausible comparative explanations; 1944 Raphael Lemkin: Nazi practice was distinctive for promoting group destruction not just group domination, it was a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups with the aim of anihilating the groups completely; annihilation: must have a mode--a way in which destruction is carried out, must have a subject--an actor or something that annihilates, must have a direct object or victim; intentional group annihilation is the definition's core idea but definitions differ on how the intent is conceptualized, how the mode is defined, how the agent is defined and how the victim is defined; intention is secondary to group annihilation; there are definitive and less so definitive modes of genocide; there are subtypes of genocide based on type of victim group, historical and social context, and perpetrator objective-->it can help to indicate an explanation of why the genocide happened; should victim group or perpetrator objective categorize the subgroup; useful social-scientific concept that refers to a specific, even exceptional phenomenon

War in the Gray: Exploring the Concept of Dirty War by M. L. R. Smith and Sophie Roberts

guerra sucia; use of torture and disappearance of a large number of civilians; used the dirty war as a strategic practice; implies moral judgement--practicioners are unlikely to use this term to describe what they do; the phrase is used as a weapon of condemnation; dirty war is an active force designed to achieve given ends; consistent use of large scale force; do not necessarily lack support and legitimacy from large sections of the populace; DIRTY WAR vs. CLEAN WAR: dirty war must be in contradiction to more accepted forms of war; clean war: war is openly constituted, it is known who the main protagonists are, there is a formal declaration of war and a declaration of the end of war, conduct will be bound by certain rules, laws and conventions that will act as constraints, clear distinction exists between combatants and civilians and a conscious effort should be made to avoid non-combatant casualties; dirty war: no formal declaration or announcement of hostilities and the end of conflict may not be known, unlikely to be subject to recognized laws and conventions, seeming absense of rule-bound arrangements, facade of legality, distinction between combatants and non-combatants will not be observed; it is manifest within states instead of between states; DIRTY WAR: linguistic trap with overriding negative moral connotations; dirty wars are characterized by sociomedical languate that stipulates the necessity of cleansing the body politic of political impurities-->importance of language used in dirty war in addition to language used to describe a dirty war; campaign of brutality is undertaken surreptitiously; quiet war; the knowledge of terrible secrets leads to the normalization of extremely violent actions; degree of deniability within government because of the inclusion of non-state actors; Dirty war as an extreme form of countersubversion: eradicate an internal threat-->dissuades people from joining through fear of arrest, normally no observation of the normal operation of the criminal and judicial process; no rule of law, but rule by law (emergency measures); In Argentina: the campaign of state terror wa a premeditated, patterned, and instrumental form of government violence in that it was planned, inflicted regularly and intended to induce fear through coercive and life threatening action; expansion of the range of targets to be persecuted; reduction of the avenues of legitimate political dissent; theory of two demons; people will always desire security before freedom

Argentina's Lost Patrol, Chapter 3 by María José Moyano

guerrilla attacks focused on national turf and Argentine property abroad; mostly concentrated in the capital--not really a national movement because it was not more spread out across the country (but it could also be a reflection of the demographics since the urban population is a lot larger); most attacks were meant to strike the heart of economic and political power; Montoneros and the ERP: most active, but they also recruited from the splinter goups of other guerrilla movements; evolution of types of attacks from 1969-1979: airplane hijackings, bombings; evolution of seizures from low risk to high risk (schools-->military installations); kidnappings and ransom an extremely effective way to get funding for actions; revolutionary tax: extracted from companies to enseure their executives would not be abducted; in 25% of kidnappings it is almost impossible to pinpoint a motive; growing disregard for public opinion-->more and more deaths as a result of violence; cult of death: decreasing value attached to life; the guerrillas originally had a 'revolutionary morality' which differentiated them from the army, but this was eventually lost

In the Wake of War Introduction: Conflict, Democratization and the State by Cynthia J. Arnson

guerrilla insurgency has had a decisive impact on the nature and quality of democratization; positive and mutually reinforcing relationship between deomcratization and peace processes to end guerrilla war; must assess the ability of postwar regimes to address questions of political inclusion within the parameters of an explicitly agreed upon political architecture; armed conflict left regimes fortified in their military and/or repressive dimensions but weak in their capacity to engage in the interrelated political, economic and social tasks that would prevent future violence or address root causes; The Peace Accords allowed the participation of previously excluded groups; how conflict ends has a decisive influence on postwar political development; the nature of the state and its capacity to fulfill basic functions constitute more useful concepts for exploring postwar democratization; neoliberalism pushed aside the state in a crucial transition period

The Victims of Ciudad Juarez Feminicide: Sexually Fetishized Commodities by Julia Estela Moarrez Fragoso

methods of torture take away any humanity from the victim, and take away their womanness; production, construction and economic exploitation of women's bodies; bodies are for labor (Marx); unequal valuation of worker's bodies; murders take place because someone else has granted themself possession of women's bodies

The Myths of Violence: Gender, Conflict and Community in El Salvador by Mo Hume

high levels of violence following the Peace Accords; use of violence and the legitimization of its use; myths of violence: "the accepted (and often unquestioned) norms and values that shape both the ontological and epistemological appreciation of violence; the family is a key site of violence, particularly in its gendered forms; difference between social, economic and political violence; "violence has become a normal option for many people in the region, pointing to a broader democratization of aggression and force"; high levels of crime and aggression have been linked to the exclusionary political economy of neoliberalism, the history of conflict and militarized violence, fragile democracies and weak or failed states, and issues of culture; "dominant ways of being a man are privileged and validated in this setting, thus reproducing power differentials and gender inequalities"; "violence becomes a key expression of masculine behavior and a mechanism for ensuring continued male privilege"; naturalization of unequal power structures; functionality of violence within familial relations; importance of silencing women's experiences of violence in order to strengthen the patriarchal structures; impunity for gender-based violence; form of structural violence: "...male domination over women is institutionally established, creating structural limitations on women's opportunities within the social order"; men have a right to punish women who deviate from the acceptable notions of femininity; violence is possible because of the degree of mistrust and the deep divisions that may be rooted in history, the feeling of impotence against the enormity of violence

Lecture 9

how countries shift out of and transform violence; GUATEMALA: takes place in te wake of the UN agenda for peace; pushes the boundaries of what could be expected from international peace-keeping; broadens the logistical, operational and conceptual parameters that had been regarded for peace processes; EL SALVADOR AND GUATEMALA: standard elite pacts to a certain degree; benefited from the presence of the international community; Esquipulas II; key issues to consider: who are the actors involved? was civil society included? what are its capacities? balance of power between the military and the guerrilla? to what degree does the guerrilla have international support? what are the themes being negotiated? broad v. limited; in El Salvador the peace process was a dialogue without negotiation which was focused mostly on a military solution; in Guatemala there were a lot more themes to the peace talks and it took a lot longer, but it was more than just a military settlement to the conflict; gradual involvement of the revolutionary left in politics; purging and punishment of those responsible for war crimes; Flat Pact Peace: the international community designed the framework fot the peace initiatives which were designed to reach a liberal peace; causes like social and economic and political exclusion were not really addressed; question of land; question of the sustainability of the peace process; no effective or meaningful consideration of drugs in Guatemala; 'recipe' imposed on conflicts without regard for context; What went right: the role of the international community, role of civil society, role of the US, shift from hardline to softline military, push economic elites to get behing the peace process; what went wrong: did not effectively build a state, spoiling actors, no consolidation of human rights protection measures, heavy handed international intervention let local elites off the hook; COLOMBIA: cycle of negotiations and failed negotiations; political reform and democrati opening; economic help to affected areas; presidents lack key political support for negotiations often; guerrillas overplayed their roles as new political actors; 'devious objectives'; state will not negotiate social/political reform; new constitution played a central role in peace building and negotiation; compulsion to include civil society under Pastrana; driven by the electoral cycle; lack of genuine consensus among the elite; structural causes are not being negotiated

Ciudadana X: Gender Violence and Denationalization of Women's Rights in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico by Alicia Schmidt Camacho

how has neoliberal policy permitted and necessitated the conversion of poor migrants into a population with little purchas on rights or representation within either the nation-state or new global politics; "just as globalization enfranchises a new class of post-national elites, it also fosters the conversion of marginalized people into 'disposable non-citizens' whose value to the international system derives from their lack of acces to rights; feminization of disposable non-citizenship in Ciudad Juarez; women's movements have had to look outside Mexico to find institutions that will help them get rights from the government; development of the border space is extremely tied to cheap women's labor; sale of women's sexual labor as well; refusal to ensure women's entitlements to freedom; colonias of migrants which lack adequate infrastructure; mothers' involvement in civil associations threatens their integration into the workforce; beginning of assertion of female agency in accounts of kidnappings and disappearances; women are learning they have rights and that they can fight back; feminized narrative of genocide; cultural stigma attached to sexual assault

Commentary: Democratic Consolidation in Postconflict States in Latin America--Insights from the Peace Building and Fragile States Literature by Patrick Stewart

peace and democracy are mutually reinforcing in the long run, but there are tensions in the short run; postconflict societies are assumed to have abnormal transitions from authoritarian rule; democratic transition must be viewed as part of a conflict transformation; state-building is critical for enduring peace so state institutions must be fixed

From Turmoil to Stability in America by Consuelo Cruz

in Central America, political democracy was a means of pacification in post-Cold War; GUATEMALA: National Constitutional Assembly; seek peace negotiations with the URNG; substantial peace would require the formal integration of both extremes; the new democracy was plagued by corruption; de Leon Carpio makes significant advances in peace-making process, he makes it more inclusive; Alvaro Arzu-->party had control of the executive and the legislature at the same time and the completed and formulated a negotiated settlement with the URNG (December 29, 1996); 2003-->allow Rios Montt to campaign for presidency; promises of solutions fo problems never came true and people don;t trust that they will; electoral competition has increased, but so has electoral violence; EL SALVADOR: FMLN finally reached a stalemate with the army; powerful external pressure for negotiation; dissatisfaction at the top and poverty at the bottom were overshadowed by the taming and integration of the FMLN; has yet to procude a viable combination of order and justice; rejection of candidates who had participated in the war (on both sides, ARENA and FMLN); NICARAGUA: Sandinista National Liberation Front seized power and attempted to implement a leftist version of just order but then there was a civil war between the Sandinistas and the US-backed contras; now there is a solid record of electoral continuity and peaceful transfers of power; regardless of particular electoral outcomes, winners and losers alike are trapped in a corrupt and corrupting political-institutional structure of their own making; a pact is usually implemented in order to resolve some political conflict that it ultimately aggravates

Territory, Sovereignty, and Crimes of the Second State: The Writing on the Body of Murdered Women by Rita Laura Segato

in Ciudad Juarez, peolpe can witness the direct link between capitlal and death; sacrifice of poor dark-skinned women engulfed in the clefts of the joints linking monetary and symbolic economy, control of resources and death power; shared collective gender imaginary of the perpetrators; psychological and moral defeat of the subjugated; masculinity is a status that is only conditionally achieved and has to be reconfirmed with certain regularity throughout life; victims are a waste product of the process of neoliberalism?; The Feminicides of Ciudad Juarez: the border, the frontier between excess and lack, crimes speak of impunity, feminicides are producers and reproducers of impunity; violence as a language; what if justice is not possible, but some occassional degree of peace is?; equates the feminicides in Ciudad Juarez to gang violence and disputes over power and terroritoal control among elites; "A decade of impunity indicates that the crimes of Ciudad Juarez are crimes of power and therefore it may be that we can only negotiate their decrease and cessation"

Chapter Six: Legacies and Ambivalences in Guerrillas: War and Peace in Central America by D. Kruijt

legacies of the democratic transition: end of military dictatorships, demilitarization of the state, reorganization and purificaion of the armed forces, refuction of US influence, still has severe economic and social inequalities, unequal income distribution, reliance on international donors, lack of gender equality; lack of clarity about the future society they were originally fighting for; transformation of guerrilla movements into political parties; moderates within partis are more likely to gain power than the comandantes from the conflict; more leftist presidents are being elected

Guerrillas and Generals: The Dirty War in Argentina, Chapter 9 by Paul H. Levvis

military state after the 1976 coup; all governments had to conform to the basic objectives of the proceso as interpreted by the Junta Militar; 'war against subversion' was subject to the power of the regional commanders; detailed chain of command to ensure control of numerous 'security zones'; decentralization and autonomy meant enormous power in the hands of even junior officers; wanted to exterminate any possibility that the guerrilla may return; Proceso: aimed to restore a representative, republican and federal democracy aimed at a society of liberty and responsibility, rights and duties; 'Saviors of the Nation'; Cold War focus on the internal enemies of the state; The National Security Doctrine that grew out of this social analysis linked politics, economics, sociology and culture ino a more or less coherent nationalist ideology justifying a new kind of military intervention that would be both broader in scope and more intensive in its methods; los desaparacidos; the French literature on dealing with guerrillas was more influential than that of the US; "Revolutionary war not only takes possession of people physically, it also takes possession of their souls; importance of ideology because of the nature of public opinon; "Half measures ae worse than none; Repression must not be a bluff"; psychological warfare; Colonel Roger Trinquier: "terrorist should be treated as an enemy soldier whose army has to be destroyed so that it will be unable to continue fighting"; the application of French ideas was filtered through ideological prisms; the fight against communism was an all out war which required total solutions; Cold War crusaderism allied to extralegal tactics taught that morality could be suspended in the higher cause of defending the nation, the West or Christianity

Latin America's Indigenous Peoples by Donna Lee Van Cott

more generalized opening of the political system to excluded and vulnerable sectors of society denoted by the recent political mobilization and the formal incorporation of indigenous groups; strong sense of collective identity; roots of the struggles go back to haciendas; After European invasion, indigenous people had a degree of autonomy and collective land rights; social movements helped to provide a platform for interaction with national and international actors regarding economic development and human rights policies; the diversity among the indigenous groups is in tension with the necessity for unity because they are divided by ideology and personal rivalries-->until the 1990s when they began to form transnational movements; the elite reformations of political constitutions inspired indigenous organizations to mobilize in order to secure their rights--> also a response to broader societal demands to legitimize failing democratic regimes by imroving mechanisms for representation and participation; Multicultural Regional Model of Constitutionalism: rhetorical recognition of the existence of indigenous peoples as collective entities preceeding the establishment of the state, recognition of customary indigenous laws and binding public law, protection of collective property rights from sale, dismemberment of confiscation, offical status for indigenous languages, access to bilingual education; successful, national-level experiences gave indigenous movements confidence, experience and political allies-->move into formal politics; the rise of indigenous movements must be understood in the context of the collapse of the political left and its recomposition and resurgence; critique of neoliberalism; Impact on Democratic Quality: political inclusion of indigenous peoples-->new representational dimension, advocates for the impoverished, questions the legitimacy of the traditional state model in LA, challenges exclusively representative models in favor of more participatory ones; highly mobilized and angry newcomers can overload weak states, cycle of unrest

Civil Resistance, Civil Societies and Transitions Lecture 3

movement away from totalizing politics and violence; how can non-combatants engage with states that have violated their rights; omission: lack of public services; commission: commission of acts of violence; civil societies come together to pressure the state and question its legitimacy; the most important instrument is the discourse and practice of human rights-->how groups (women and indigenous, etc.) became participants and not only bystanders in their own history; civil society: a space of social interacion between the individual and the state, comprising the non-state arena of market-organized, voluntarily controlled...; contradictory; historically contingent; elite decision making and civil society demand making; action becomes contentious when it is used by people who lack regular access to institutions and use it in a way to challenge others; political opportunity structure: relative openness or closure of institutions, stability of elite arrangements, and state capacity or propensity to carry out repression; degree to which civil society can yield impact is shaped by the interaction between the capacity of the state to carry out repression and the stability of the polity of elite alignments; structural conditions aren't really the most pressing factor--more the strategy and agency of civil society; TRANSITION: interval between one political regime and another, distinctive moment in the political life of a nation, unknown duration, unpredictable, characterized by extraordinary levels of uncertainty, many times it is begun within the state itself, characterized by confusion, lack of information, inability to accurately calculate interests, complete with the second set of elections?; transition won't take place unless the state and the elites let it take place; civil society involvement will make democracy more durable and more sustainable; GILL: pressuring for liberalization (pushing elite, military, establishment towards the transition), giving the transition a democratic orientation (broaden the agenda), maintaining the direction of the transition toward democracy (preventing backsliding/authoritarian reversals), providing the regime and new political actors with a sparring partner--constantly pushing them and negotiating with them, creation and establishment of an infrastructure (Bell graph in notes...1 is before the transition, 2 and 3 at the top of the bell curve right in the middle, 2, 4 and 5 at the end of the transition); civil society has different roles at different points in the transition; encourages non-violent bargaining after the transition; creates an infrastructure for peace; SCHOOLS OF RIGHTS

Thoughts on Violence and Modernity in Latin America by Neil Larsen

must historicize violence; revolutionary/counterrevolutionary violence do not cancel each other out; cannot remove the historical context of violence because it traces a specific form of historical motion; class elites retain their dominant position--they are agents of modernization; colonial/neocolonial domination; violence as a political realtion of means to an end; new violence is due to global economic standing: they cannot undertake huge level of capital investment required to 'catch up'; leakage of violence from political to economi and social planes

Indigenous Protest and Democracy in Latin America by Deborah J. Yashar

must reevaluate ethnic cleavages and their relationship to democracy in Latin America; why have indigenous communities become increasingly politicized; history of ethnic relations has been one of violence, subordination, denial and assimilation; indigenous people have been historically treated poorly by the state; modernization is necessitated on the transcendence from ethnic ties; they have recently become more outspoken against the development activities of the state; land rights, human and civil rights, spaces for greater political participation, and rights to political and cultural autonomy; penetration of de facto indigenous areas; political representation, autonomy and self-determination; increase in indigenous mobilization because of structural violence and marginalization and discrimination; democratic and neoliberal reforms created a new legal space for the expression of new identities, but they have also been harmful to indigenous ways of life, as they have lost their land; "consequesnces of neoliberal reforms as an assault on physical, material, and cultural wellbeing"; indigenous mobilization built upon existing organizational networks and existing institutional networs used by previously organized groups in rural areas; 500 years of resisitance march; bridging ethnic cleavages helped and coincided with the deepening of democracy in the region; reconceptualizing the nation; redesign district boundaries to increase indigenous electoral representation; decentralization of political control?

The Pacification of Latin America: Guatemala by J. Dunkerley

no formal peace agreement between the government and the guerrillas and no ceasefire; lack of military repercussions; auto-golpe of President Serrano caused other issues; lack of civil society initiative due to generations of repression; the Guatemalan elite were exceptionally difficult to budge; the military failure of the URNG makes it unlikely that any eventual Guatemalan peace settlement will go further than demobilization; guerrillas want the dismantling of the institutions of the counterinsurgency stratgey as well as investigations of human rights violations; Esquipulas agreement: loose framework, National Reconciliation Commission, abolition of PACs and model villages, full respect for rights and freedom of speech, establishment of a Truth Commission, demilitarized zones; unambiguous signal from Washington to clean up human rights record; army aversion to negotiations made it difficult; the URNG does not have enough bargaining power to achieve economic goals

Violence, Democracy and Human RIghts in Latin America by Todd Landman

overall positive trend in/towards procedural democracy; there has been little to no growth in state capacity; the meaning of violence has become democratized: self-directed, interpersonal and collective violence; nonstate and state violence, legal and illegal violence; exclusion by the government is a good way to cause violence among the citizens; higher levels of violence until the consolidation of the regime

Post-Conflict Violence Lecture 10

patterns of violence; LA seen as the backyard of the US; there are internal and external challenges which shape insecurities; structural issues, institutional issues, international economic issues (resource extraction); global drug trade and the war on drugs; new violence is a consequence of the convergence of global trasnformations and local transformations; hegemony of a free-market economy; violence is contingent on globalization; weakening of the nation-state; democracy isn't delivering; violence is about the embeddedness of cultural patterns due to ethnicity, race and gender; expectation management is crucial; legacies are related to past violence; changes relative to drug and other illicit economy; proliferation of firearms; incapacity of the state to uphold the rule of law; citizens taking matters into their own hands; citizen support for extralegal actions by the police; lack of meaningful change in terms of democratization; weak criminal justice systems; link between structural violence and direct violence; Christina Steenkamp: peace process and accord will deliver development, transformation of political culture and the transformation of social relationships; improvement of physical and human security; culture of violence framework: legacy, violence is driven by a history of permissive violence and impunity, normalization of post-accord violence, violence is normalized as a tool for conflict resolution, psyhological internalization of trauma limits and lowers the boundaries to violence; must look at how conflict shapes social attitudes towards power relations; structural inequalities themselves perpetuate indirect violence on the margnalized and this can lead to real and direct violence; revictimization; post-accord violence: the peace accord did not engage with the real causes of the conflict, concessions made to the military or other elites; sacrifices in the short-term erode long-term stability; complex set of factors that are integral and mutually reinforcing and are economic, social and political: migration, poverty, lack of social capital, dysfunctional families; democratization of violence; STEENKAMP: problematizes the argument that post-accord violence is not political; high levels of violence are merely framed as crime; law and order issue rather than a political threat to the peace accords; spoiler violence: violence by those who try to impede the peace process; crime is just an indirect spoiler; state capacity (or incapacity) is emphasized here; how do we differentiate political violence from other violence; Political Violence: actions aimed at changing the state, overthrowing the state and changing the distribution of power; Economic violence: violence carried out in pursuit of material dividends; social violence: violence used in the pursuit of social power; peace process may introduce further dynamics that stimulate violence; vaccuum for violent actors to continue to operate

From Guns to the Ballot Box: Prospects for Democracy in LA by Tatiana Petrova Rizova

pockets of political instability; electoral fraud, vote buying, ballot stuffing, manipulation of voter registries; threats to Latin American democracy: military coups compromise the solid foundations of democracy, regime performance, economic development, regional political environment, multipartism; multiparty systems are more fragile because they rely on legislative coalitions; semidemocratic states are more likely to regress back to authoritarianism; states are more likely to stay democratic if democracy has taken root and if it is surrounded by other democratic societies; importance of the length of the democratic tradition; changes in attitude make people more optimistic for the success of democracy; higher trust in the church and the military than in the politicians and political institutions; rise of the left and the counterleft-->more leftist sympathizers; Hugo Chavez; the project of democracy will be limited without the express support of the US

Argentina's Lost Patrol, Chapter 4 by María José Moyano

post-1969 there was near constant collective violence; it was the weapon of numerous social groups; questioned the basis of authority rather than just protest of certain policy decisions; turn toward socialism; the military and the bourgeoisie wrongly assumed that popular organizations and guerrilla movements had close ties--this misconception caused mass organizations a lot of issues via repression and disappearances; General Jorge R. Videla (1976 coup against Isable Peron) claimed that a terrorist is someone who spreads non-Western ideas; Protest during the Argentine Revolution: Night of the Long Batons, elimination of university autonomy, student and labor dominance of protest due to exclusions; protest often spontaneously changed from peaceful to violent; different initial motives but riots often developed along similar paths: they began peacefully but turned violent once the police arrived, and when the police couldn't contain them the army was called in; the most violence groups identified as Peronist most often-->radicalized sectors of Peronism; crisis of authority; collective violent protest virtually ceased after the 1976 military coup; widespread repression

Commentary: Two Decades of Negotiation in Colombia--Contrasting Results and Missed Opportunities by Ana María Bejarano

question of how to go about negotiating with the guerrillas; fewer actors are not involved in the armed conflict; democratization by stealth; decentralization; 1991 constitution brought about the incorporation of armed actors into the assembly which made it more representative and inclusive; there is some sort of incentive for the fragmentation and atomization of political parties; need a level playing field for new actors; challenges for demobilized guerrillas; question of whether or not the entire group decides to demobilize; transformations of the international environment; counter-agrarian reform is very problematic for peace; negotiation fatigue

Gangs, Urban Violence, and Security Interventions in Central America by Oliver Jutersonke, Robert Muggah and Dennis Rodgers

rampant urbanization is said to lead to the growth of uncontrollable slums that foster criminal activity, the rise of gangs and, ultimately the violence; unprecedented groth of gangs in the last 20 years; urban manifestations in large part because a critical demographic mass of youths is essential for them to emerge; gang mobilization linked to broad structural factors such as machismo, high levels of social exclusion and horizontal inequality, legacies of authoritarianism and armed conflict and the unregulated availability of weapons; local response to post-conflict volatility; mareros reproduce structures and behavior patterns that had earlier provided them with support and security in the states--local clikas in their communities of origin in which they supplant or absorb pandillas; gang involvement in the drug trade is very possible; Mano Dura (repressive approach to gang control); first-generation policies tend to contribute to and exacerbate the routine stigmatization of gang members, thus preventing their reform and ultimately meaningful reintegration into society; mano amiga and mano extendida: second-generation--provide alternatives to gang activity, weapons collections, education for at-risk youth; gangs aren't actually as terrorizing and violent as the media makes them out to be--they mostly take part in petty crime; "they are the consequence of increasing (regional and national) inequality and exclusion, and as such a reflection of deeply iniquitous social processes

War Transitions and the New Civilian Security in Latin America by Charles T. Call

regime transitions toward democracy inherently carry high degrees of uncertainty abou the rules of the political game; no steps toward civilianization of the countries; democratic transitions pose intstitutional and personal threats to the military leadership because they lose their ability to block persecution, they lose access to bribes and ilicit income; "unless the military is significantly weakened, it will prevail in prohibiting significant demilitarization of internal security systems; El Salvador saw the most far-reaching military, police and human rights reforms in Latin American history; the crime wave empowered critics of the negotiated civilianizing police reforms, who proposed rolling some of them back; vigilante justice; main outlines of civilianizing reform remained but were chipped away through newer laws and presidential decrees; "civilianization of public security has not meant that private forms of security are absent. Under prior militarized policing, private security elements played an important role in protecting the interests of elites and the state"; raises questions about the equity of security of the rich and poor; demilitarization is a necessary but insufficient condition to ensure that citizens' rights and protection are the core of the new civilian security

Resurrecting Civil Society (and restructuring public space) by Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter

revival of civil society is set against the success of most authoritarian reimes in depoliticizing as well as atomizing their respective societies (and the destruction of self-organized and autonomously defined political spaces); the catalyst for transformation comes from exemplary individuals who begin testing the boundaries of behavior and the mutual discoveries of common ideals; artists and intellectuals-->universities, literary journals and scholarly reviews-->regimes early supporters and the privileged groups-->independent and salaried professionals (the middle sector)-->new/revived identities and capacity for collective action among the working class; explosion of grassroots movements; groups come together and support each others' efforts toward democratization; population is bound together on equal terms, struggling for the common goal of a new social order; the shorter and more unexpected transition from authoritarian rule, the greater the likelihood of ppular upsurge

Introduction and Conclusions in Death Squads or Self-Defense Forces by Julie Mazzei

self-declared self-defense forces; declare their own legitimacy as defenders of security; they act outside of the two recognized actors in the armed conflicts--not the state and not the guerrilla; evidence of state complicity and unofficial ties to the paramilitary; parallel to the state?; "paramilitary groups are political, armed organizations that are by definition extra-military, extra-state, noninstitutional entities"; do not exist to protect the interests of society as a whole but to protect the interests of a privileged sector; uses violence to protect the established order rather than overthrow it; problematizes the dichotomization of civil society and the state; usurpation or delegation of part of the state's monopoly over the legitimate use of violence to an extra-state actor; privatization of violence; allows the state to appear clean; power vaccuum in collapsed or weak states; paramilitarism as a strategy to counter reform efforts; paramilitaries are likely to occur in countries where: access to the political system has been limited, elite have an entrenched sense of security and dependence upon the system, political elite, military and/or political officials have a history of providing arms to civilians loyal to the regime with a directive to combat other civilians who are perceived as posing a threat to the elite, new or oppositional political or social force, external or internal pressures prevent the state from using overt state-sponsored force; paramilitary groups are the political manifestation of profound uncertainty among a cross-section of a country's most resources sectors; paramilitary groups are a product of changing political environments that create opportunities for some and exreme uncertainty for others; there has been a failure to address the motivation behind paramilitary action; political and structural shifts begin to slowly chip away at the opportunity structure that had given impetus to the paramilitary groups in El Salvador; paramilitary groups provide backlash to the expanding access to the state led by sectors who have traditionally monopolized access and who fear marginalization

Mothers, Widows and Guerrilleras: Anonymous Conversations with Survivors of State Terror by Victoria Sanford

silence is a strategic tool for survival; the necessity of remaining anonymous demonstrates that the dangers embedded in violence are ever present in the consciousness and in the realities of these women; Rafael: was in a detention center, separation of the men and the women, torture, killings, "the lives of the Guatemalan women were imbued with the torture, disappearance and assassination of children, relatives, friends and neighbors"; report is about women as subjects of their own history; diversity of personal experience-->look at the uniqueness of individual experience while getting a look at the myriad of ways in which state terror wreaked havoc on the fabric of society, culture, community and family; Josefina: 6 disappeared family members, explanation of the process of realizing their family members were disappeared to getting the graves exhumated to the necessity of judgement and the end of impunity; Juana: husband was elected military commissioner, because he wouldn't harm people, the military began to threaten him and he was taken away in the middle of the night, and found dead the next morning, she put the men in jail but the were quickly released and now her family has been sentenced to a life of poverty because there is no man to tend the fields and make money-->justice would be to see her daughters in school and to see the men that killed her husband have to pay for it; Maria: saw numerous family members killed, joined the guerrilla at 15, decided to be a combatabt, she figured she would be afraid regardless, so why not join the guerrilla, normalization of guerrilla life, "began to belive that women have every capacity that men have", had troubles readjusting to a life where she was not actually considered to be equal; "impunity is a law of exception which permits and foments actions of the state against its citizens. It is anti-democratic in that it inverts the relationship of a state which represents and responds to the needs of the people to a people who are submitted to the whims of the state"; "amnesty places truth outside the structure of the transition from military rule and outside the structure of the foundation being laid for the new civilian government"; people have different definitions and meanings through their political mobilization

Chapter 3 of Social Movements, Indigenous Politics and Democratization in Guatemala by Roddy Brett

the discourse of human rights was the main instrument for popular opposition; human rights are also a way of understanding and investigating the past; Los quinientos anos de resistancia (500 years of resistance); "To claim marginalization and oppression based on cultural grouns in the post-Cold War context within a nation-state that had treated class-based opposition with a ferocious and unrelenting brutality appeared initially more politically effective and less dangerous that claims based on grounds of economic exclusion"; extension of rights to include indigenous aspects of their identity as integral to them, in short, their specific and collective rights as indigenous people; post-Peace Process: new organizations combined popular and Mayanist tendencies; formation of new institutions and changing socio-political context that occurred as a result of the peace processes and negotiations; La Asamblea (de la sociedad civil) in 1994; people became aware of their rights and through discourse, elites also became aware of the peoples' rights; new pressure to adhere to the rule of law; discourses and practice of human rights and the rights of indigenous people were identified as fundamental to the peace process and became key to the emerging culture of righs

Latin American Democratization since 1978: Democratic transitions, Breakdowns and Erosions by S. Mainwaring and A. Pérez-Liñán

trends in democratization in Latin America: free and fair elections, good protections for civil liberties, universal suffrage, no encroachment of the military or other nonelected actors in the domain of elected powers; broader and more enduring transition; Waves of Democracy: Samuel Huntington--a wave of democratization is a group of transitions from non-democratic to democratic regimes that occur within a specified period of time and that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction; more frequent transitions to democracy post-1978; semi-democratic regimes become more enduring; liklihood of democratic transition increases; independent variables that influence democratic or authoritarian transitions: level of development, class structure, regime economic performance, regional political environment, US foreign policy, party system fragmentation, party system polarization; importance of the historical contingency of certain variables; transitions marked by a high degree of indeterminacy; transitions did not depend on structural facrots but structural factors were a better predictor of democratic breakdowns; deeper democracies were able to withstand factors that were previously believed to lead to democratic breakdown; changing international ideological context, changing Catholic Church (Vatican II); OAS and other Multilateral Organizations-->interventions and direct sanctions against undemocratic regimes; decreasing polarization in the third wave; politics of compromise and moderation post-1978; changing attitudes about democracy-->left is finally finding democracy agreeable; more and more people become convinced of the necessity of democracy; stabilization of regime change; democratic erosions; stagnations of democracy; attempted coups, impeachments and pseudo-constitutional forms of deposing presidents; instability due to the fragility of many elected governments; dip in the committment to democracy; organizations are powerless to prod semi-democratic regimes into further democratization; difficulties of democratic deepening have been greater in the poorer countries of the region; poor regime performance has also bred citizen disaffection and paved the way to populist politicians with dubious democratic credentials

From 'Restricted' to 'Beseiged': The Changing Nature of the Limits to Democracy in Colombia by Ana María Bejarano and Eduardo Pizzaro

uninterrupted civilian democracy; free but with an inclination toward assassination and murder; deterioration of civil liberties; illiberal democracy: absence of state capable of guaranteeing a constitutional order, absence of the rule of law, extrainstitutional field and electoral field; Core of democracy: inclusion of the majority of the adult population, competitive, free, clean and regular elections, respect for and effective protection of civil rights and liberties, ability of elected officials to govern without being subject to external controls or vetoes by nonelected actors but not really accompanied by other attributes of democracy; limited and restricted elections (only 2 main parties); gruesome human rights record; military autonomy; contradictory tendencies: greater democratization and a deterioration of the indicators of civility, of respect and protection of basic citizens' rights and liberties, and of civilian control of the military; "violence distorts democracy's participatory and competitive dimensions"; there is no clear beginning of the democratic erosion; more fertile ground for more democratic forms of government such as transformations unleashed by modernization and structural changes related to urbanization; reincorporation of guerrilla groups into the political sphere; but there has also been a deepening radicalizaion of the FARC and ELN; increasing ideological polarization; crumbling system of political representation: antidemocratic National Front; 1980s-1990s saw an opening in the channels of access to power and broader representation in society but the logic of incorporation has led to an extremely lax electoral system--too many political parties which has had a negative impact on governance; Erosion and Partial Collapse of the State: violation of civil rights and liberties; loss of coercive capacities; inability of central state to extend throughout the entire territory; delegation of control to non-state actors; causes: consolidation of guerrilla forces, exhaustion from 3 decades of internal armed conflict, expansion of illegal drug market, criminal organizations; new alternate suppliers of protection; state erosion has had a negative impact on the capacity to deliver justice, incapacity to deal with social conflict, crucial effect on the rule of law, new subnational systems of power

Violence and Globalization in Latin America by Roberto Briceño-León and Verónica Zubillaga

unprecedented growth in the homicide rate in Latin America; economic crisis; "the new violence in Latin America is a consequence of the convergence of global transformations and local transformations in urban society since the 1980s"; dismantling of the welfare state; deterioration of public services and devaluation of social rights among the most vulnerable populations; growth of the informal sector; drug wars, territorial issues; crimes against people have increased; "the lethality is a consequence of the massive spread of firearms among the population, including both people for whom crime is a way of life and those for whom it is not"; state inability to guarantee safety and intensification of insecurity make people acquire weapons; "the poor are disproportionaltely victimized by violence"; fear imposes a high cost on society

Obedience without Compliance: The Role of Government, Organized Crime, and NGOs in the System of Impunity That Murders the Women of Ciudad Juarez by Hector Dominguez-Ruvalcaba and Patricia Ravelo Blancas

unstoppable violence; implication that the perpetrators of the feminicides act with the protection of the authorities, as do drug traffickers, human traffickers, kidnappers, and other areas of organized crime; fratrias and their initiation are behind some of the killings; lots of documentation to prove police participation in organized crime; criminal organizations act like a state within a state; victims of violence are less a priority than the city's image and economic development; invisibilization of victims; discourse used to make Ciudad Juarez a victim of a criminal society rather than the state complicit in the criminal actions; dialogue between the Mexican government and the HROs has virtually ended; there have been lots of recommendations but the government doesn't listen to them; organized crime places great restrictions on governmet; the state is no longer the sole sovereign power responsible for abuses agaisnt its inhabitants, for it is also beholden to the transnational forces that rule the global economy, including the globalized network of organized crime

Political Transition, Social Violence, and Gangs: Cases in Central America and Mexico by José Miguel Cruz, Rafael Fernández de Castro, and Gema Santamaría Balmaceda

violence continues to be a problem for the transition to democracy; attributed to youth gangs and organized crime linked to drug trafficking; in order to understand the evolution of the maras we must look at the shortcomings in processes of political transition and how these lay the groundwork for later state responses that have aggravated the problem of youth violence; migration, poverty, social exclusion, legacy of military conflict and authoritarianism, lack of social capital, culture of violence, rapid urban expansion and disorder, dysfunctional families, lack of opportunities; maras are also a result of the actions taken by the government to fight them; legions of unemployed former soldiers; no democratic memory, therefore states had to build new rules based on authoritarian notions and institutions; increase in petty crime; access to firearms; groups involved in organized crime whose main motivation is the illegal control of resources and persons; mano dura policies; development and implementation of government sponsored programs for the prevention of youth violence; "Mano dura policies consist of police programs that have identified the maras and young people associated with them as Public Enemy No. 1, desercing of repression, control and incarceration; involvement in other actors besides the state in the combating of the maras; repressive government response; violation of public security institutions; "repressive programs made possible in part by the failure of reforms to establish transparent and professional institutions independent of electoral agendas"; "violence is a symptom of state weakness and of the failure to institutionalize important democratic reforms"

End of Discussion: Violence, Participatory Democracy, and the Limits of Dissent in Colombia by Mary Roldán

violence may not be an indicator for democratic failure; previously marginalized groups are gaining more visibility; violent pluralism; the war on drugs and terror provides a justification of the restriction of civil liberties; 1997 saw a dramatic escalation of violence that indiscriminately targeted villages; fraud, corruption and undue influence have allowed vioence to coexist with and shape the contours of this more limited and clientelist form of democracy; allowance of violence and view of regular political action as challenging poses a threat to formal democracy; No Violence Movement: Asamblea Comunitaria; saw violence as a result of an abuse of authority of the armed forces rather than their lack of presence in the area and also pointed a finger at the paramilitaries; the state compromised its legitimacy by allowing the paramilitaries to act in its place; call to nonviolence; remains a fight for control over development; paramilitaries create fear and then say people who are afraid must be guilty; rises in violene broaded the awareness of a non-violent approach; use of the internet to create a virtual community; call attention to unresolved structural issues that underlie local conflictsl by adopting no-violence, they claim a neutral space of interaction for the discussion of political and economic alternatives to the conflict

Violence and Fear in Colombia: fragmentation of space, contraction of time and forms of evasion by Luis Alberto Restrepo

war of all against all; state is failing to provide security; Hobbesian state of nature; violence is an objective phenomenon but fear is subjective; geographic and demographic locations are obstacles to national integration and the full expansion of the state; violence has taken place mostly in rural zones; violence is characterized by clashes between groups; disputed zones contrast with the apparent tranquility of zones that are controlled by the guerrillas or the paramilitaries (where there is no contestation); in urban areas, more selective and isolated activities characterize the conflict; desensitization of Colombians; unequal distribution of violence; fragmentation of space through fear; closing of vital social spaces; society of extreme fear; people are confined in cities because they are too afraid to leave; shortening of horizons of individual and collective futures; future seems limited; restrained desire to improve living conditions; life is very much 'day-to-day'; productive investment in the economy has diminished and political activity is concentrated on short-term strategies and measures to deal with insecurity and conflict; importance of the government rather than social capital in creating a collective vision of the future; displacement, escapism via drugs, gangs BUT apparent inexhaustible humor

Argentina Lecture 4

what factors permitted the emergence of authoritarianism; HISTORY: in 1930, it was the wealthiest country in LA, ethnically homogeneous, culturally advanced, constitutionally controlled elite democracy with an established middle class; 1940s: economic meltdown and an end to 68 years of civilian rule; tendency to turn towards militaries in moments ofcrisis; Peron: support for the working class, legalizes unions to redistribute wealth, policy of nationalization (state-led economy), successful industrialization process; overthrown in 1955 with Evita's death-->swing between civilian and military control until Peron regains control in 1973; The Peronist interregnum saw the rise of Ongania who banned political parties, banned the labor movement, drained universities; saw the rise of the revolutionary army of the people (ERP) and the Montoneros emerge out of closed social and political spaces and the radicalization of groups in society; 1971 marked the beginnings of torture and disappearances and the splitting of the left; Peron from exile promises a socialist Argentina but when he comes back to power he doesn't deliver and actually enforces a crackdown against the left; organization of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance; Isabel takes over in 1975 and is basically controlled by Rega; Operation Independencia, and Decree 2772 in October of 1975; March 1976 coup: pretended to be a rescue campaign, applauded by Argentinians; constant state of counterinsurgency; importance of a complicit society; the ERP and Montoneros were very violent but the state was inevitably more violent; theory of two demons-->violence was reactive of one another; life continued as normal for most people; "as many people will die as is necessary to restore order"; importance of the communicative capacity of terrorism; necessity to "remove the cancer of progressive thinking"

Violencia Femicida: Violence against Women and Mexico's Structural Crisis by Mercedes Olivera and Victoria J. Furio

women are being murdered in Mexico at an alarming rate, since the 1990s this rate has increased dramatically in direct relation to the expansion of neoliberalism; "in the majority of cases, women are murdered by someone known to them or related through work, family or romantic involvement"; bodies show the brutality carried out against them; misogynous violence; cultural models assign women positions that subordinate them to the peronal and institutionalized power of men which creates real and symbolic inequalities; "Femicide and femicidal violence can be identified as specific forms of gender violence, which is defined by the United Nations as a mechanism of domination, control, oppression, and power over women"; constant violation of the human rights of women and girls; reaffirms and reproduces gender relations of domination and subordination; neoliberal mandates have been put into practice through institutionalized patriarchal power; pressure from failings of neoliberal system exacerbate already existing tensions within male-female relations; change in employment patterns have not been accompanied by a change in patriarchal attitudes and mentalities or the stereotyped vision of the social roles of men and women; destruction of the sexual division of labor and the feminization of poverty and flexible labor; "the economic crisis has given rise to various types of social violence; gangs have also become a growing threat to women; "murders of women, wherever they occur, are rarely treated with professionalism by prosecutors and judges. Not only are most cases inadequately investigated and documented, but the justice system's treatment of the families affected is truly inhuman"

Women's Movements in International Perspective Chapter 6 by Maxine Molyneux

women's movements are contingent upon: prevailing cultural configurations, family forms, political formations, forms and degree of female solidarity, and the character of civil society in the regional and national context; redefinition of public and private spheres and women's lived relationship to each; mobilization to demand suffrage with clear hierarchy (within the movement); pursue women's gender interests as well as bring resistance to the dominant system; from where does the authority to define women's goals, priorities and actions come?; too independent: independent action-based in order to define universal goals; associational linkage: independent organizations choose to form alliances with other political organizations with which they are in agreement on a range of issues but this risks cooptation and a loss of agenda setting; Directed-Mobilizations: authority and initiative come from outside and above, subject to a higher authority, no room for genuine negotiation about goals, use of women's movements as instruments for the realization of the higher authority's goals; women's interests are historically and culturally constituted; gender interests v. women's interests: social interests and the positioning of the sexes, placement within the sexual division of labor, transformation of social relations in order to enhance women's position and secure a more lasting repositioning; interests are different from needs because they are intentional (but there can be some overlap); politics involved in the articulation of women's interets?