It’s hard to believe that a country like Argentina has experienced such dark times. While reading Feitlowitz, A lexicon of terror, Argentina and the legacies of torture, I really started getting goosebumps as I went along the lines of horrible meanings to words that I actually use on a daily basis such as “capucha.” This article is basically all about how language was used as a way either to hide things in a euphemistic way or to use it as a code language. Reminded me of how in 1939 the Nazi’s started using that type of language to hide the fact that horrific crimes were about to be committed.  The altering of words was part of the methods used to control and manipulate people so that they wouldn’t be able to understand what was really going on.  For instance, the usage of the word “tratamiento” which in reality means to “treat” someone was used as the word for “torture.” It’s really horrifying how things turned out in Argentina and how, even after WWII and the Holocaust, we still saw in 1976 some of the similar techniques or approaches used by the Nazi’s.

“Fifteen thousand disappeared ten thousand prisoners, four thousand dead, hundreds of thousands uprooted; these are the raw statistics of terror” (1).  Walsh’s letter to the Military Junta was a very courageous act.  He throws out so many secret details like the amount of money invested in the military, intended to prove that those policies were more important than human rights abuses, and it was very hard not to believe his honest words. While the people involved in and with the military were becoming richer, the rest of the population was suffering the consequences. La Guerra Sucia was more than sucia!

(Reuters) - Mexico is exploring legal action against activists who asked the International Criminal Court to investigate officials for allowing subordinates to kill and torture civilians as the government battles against drug gangs, President Felipe Calderon’s office said on Sunday.

What did I learn? Rather, what do I think I learned or what do I think I know now?

Long answer short, not enough, and at least not thoroughly enough.

I’ll be honest, before this class, I hadn’t put too much thought into Human Rights. I suppose I knew I would be able to defend myself with  my rights at some point if need be, but as stated in a previous post, I’ve never been in a situation where my rights needed to be defended or evoked. Not only that, but now that we have studied the discourse of Human rights from its inception, they don’t really have the same meaning to me. I guess that in the beginning I didn’t really understand the globalization of rights and the need for them to be thought of as such. Whatever we think our rights are vary in terms of culture, religion and geography.

It’s amazing that rights as a discourse can be molded as the platform for any movement. As Jon stated early on in the course, it wasn’t about bashing America, who often seem the secret perpetrators who violate Human Rights. There is of course some truth to that as we found out from our Guatemala case study regarding United Fruit and many other military coups in Latin America orchestrated by the United State’s economic influence. Although an easy target, there is more to it than just blaming the United States. It just takes a little patience and thought.

We read news stories and case studies which infuriated me. I have to say that Jon’s stance was ever more appealing in those situations. That is why I hadn’t published a lot of my blogs. They were less about the discussion of rights and more about my frustration with society. So, yes I edited myself which almost seems to go against the goal of blogging.

How surprising that Universal Rights declared by the UN (which I thought actually meant something) are not actually universal. One thing that really surprised me was how hard rights have to be fought for when they’re considered something universal, natural, something shared between all 7 billion of us. Canada’s hoity-toity approach to Universal Human Rights has been officially shattered for me. I firmly believe that you cannot claim any rights that you would deny someone else. For an example is the case of migrant workers in Canada. From what I understand, there is a 40-year-old government program called SAWP (The Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program) in which our government engages in an agreement with a country like Mexico to receive cheap labour. So people from Mexico come to work on farms here doing difficult work and getting paid unfair wages and live in terrible working conditions. If the situation was reversed, I assume our government would be spieling all sorts of Human Rights jargon demanding fair and just treatment to Canadians. So not only do we have the gross hypocrisy of the Canadian government but also the indifference of the Mexican government to defend their citizen’s rights. This situation of Mexico and Canada is not unique to the relationship between Canada and Latin American countries. All one has to do is look at Canadian Mining Company’s activities in Latin America and there will be more examples of hypocrisy and the disdain of some Latin American governments.

I’m really grateful for the great discussions we’ve had and ideas shared. I’ve been thinking about the fact that there are 7 billion of us on this planet and the tangibility of universal rights when there’s so many people. One of the interesting things I observed was the relevance of declarations on rights from the seventeenth and eighteenth century have pertaining to current social situations.

Finally, I don’t know that I know anything, I may have learned a bit but learning is an ongoing process and therefore one of the things I will continue doing is questioning rights. Are they natural, stagnant? What constitutes a right? Who decides what rights are? How do we enforce rights? One of the most important things I feel that we discussed was about the things or people whose rights haven’t been declared. What about the rights  of people in the LBGT community? What about rights to education? The one that I’m specifically grappling with at the moment, is water a human right? For some food water for thought about that check out this link.

http://thetyee.ca/News/2006/03/22/WaterRight/

Well, what else can I say about the term except, We’ll always have Paris Rights.

Right…..?

Let me just start off by saying that I am extremely happy I decided to take this course, mostly for one reason. Like I said in my first blog post, this term I also took “Global Indigenous Politics”. A course where tensions are high due to the fact that a lot of my classmates are extremely closely tied to and attached to the issue at hand, and therefore pressure to be politically correct at all times seems necessary in order not to offend anyone. Coming to class every Monday is always a breath of fresh air.

For this reason, mostly to vent after my politics course, I came to the realization [pretty early on] that it can’t be that simple: Human Rights = GREAT, Colonialism = the DEVIL. That Human Rights as an effective concept in International Relations and domestic policy is much more complicated than that, that there’s got to be some deep issue with HR—one that may not be possible to overcome.

[And I am saying this NOT because I want Professor Beasley-Murray to think he has converted me. Because I absolutely DO NOT want to give him an excuse not to teach this course again—that would be terribly sad.]

But anyway…

Early on in the term in my indigenous politics course we were assigned a reading by Professor Glen Coulthard who teaches in the Indigenous Studies department here at UBC – “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada” [highly recommended reading]. In this article he argues that the Indigenous Peoples of Canada have framed most of their efforts in achieving self-determination through a language of “recognition”: that the state ‘recognize’ them as peoples within the law and grant them given rights like self-determination and sovereignty. But he argues that this is problematic because it recreates the relationship of dominance that was a problem to begin with. That the state is the only entity with the power to grant these rights and that is problematic because it will only do this in so far as it is in its best interest and under its own terms [Obviously I’m paraphrasing to the max, but hopefully not completely butchering his thesis…]. He did this by framing his arguments in light of the work of Frantz Fanon. This article was the first to cause me raise any critical questions in terms of Human Rights and rights based discourse. [It was assigned before our readings on the end of rights].

I had already read The Wretched of the Earth but this article motivated me to read a bit of Black Skin White Masks for our review paper.

Ironically, both these works and the journey that Fanon took within them turned out to be the perfect illustration of how I have come to feel about Human Rights after this term.

1.      Human Rights, these are all things that should be obvious? – but I guess writing them down can’t hurt.

2.       Who gets to decide what rights are included and excluded? Who’s protected and who isn’t? à Politics behind the establishment of Human Rights, relationships of power. Definitely problematic, usually the people who have the power to do something about rights are the ones who are abusing them in the first place. Human rights declarations established only in so far as they are in the interest of the state who is granting them à if they are NOT in their interest, violations continue to occur.

3.       We need to work on changing the ideology/mentality/situations on the ground at the local level that allow for abuses to occur in the first place à issue of human security rather than rights. [which I know is a “buzz word” as well  but if we start framing it in terms of security then its more manageable, tangible and therefore easier to create POLICIES.]

4.        Strong domestic legal protections  > Universal/International [honor based/grandiose] declarations on Human Rights.

5.        The above only tends to happen after VIOLENT struggle. 

I think human rights matter. I think the discourses can be sloppy, manipulated to meet class interests, and can perpetuate racism, but that’s not the whole story.  You may say that most human rights documents and organizations uphold western liberal notions of what is good and what is bad, because that is pretty much true.  But I think the idea of completely dismissing human rights is a privilege held primarily by western academics and students that overspecialize in criticism and often forget about reality, their own uber-privilege, and their own abundance of entitlement to fundamental Human rights    If our class (LAS 301) were to fly to Cairo tonight and go chat with demonstrators at Tahrir Square, what do you think they would say if you asked them what is the useful nature of the human right to political expression? What if you went to the occupied Palestinian territories, only a couple hours east from Cairo, and asked people what they thought about the human right to nationhood and/or citizenship? What if you flew to Burma and told the ethnic Karen peoples hiding deep in the jungle from the military junta that in Canada everyone has a right to freedom of association, to cultural expression, to practice one’s religion?  Do you really think they would dismiss that as a western hegemonic conspiracy? Saying that human rights are useless is a privilege reserved for bourgeois intellectuals, people that are carrying out the abuse themselves, or people free from the danger of having their fundamental rights abused.  We live in the mainstream of a nation where our most fundamental rights are guaranteed, and if they were to be trampled upon excessively, nobody would tolerate it and there would be intervention.  I’m not saying that human rights are perfect, or that they are effective.  They aren’t.  I agree that we should unpack human rights discourses and always remain skeptical, but please, spare me the notion that they are useless, because that notion is filled with entitlement and white privilege.

This course, especially led by an instructor that was openly against against human rights was great because it made me step back and look at human rights critically, and pair them with Latin America.  As previously mentioned, and mentioned in almost everybody else’s final posts, I found it to be a concept plagued with inconsistency…but isn’t that true for almost any principle, philosophy, or ideology?  As an amateur Latin Americanist, I was at many points happy, empowered, angered, and saddened by the topics we explored.  For those of you that had previously not studied much about this part of the hemisphere, I hope that you now can see that the Americas continues enduring injustice and exploitation, but that this is countered by an even richer history of resistance, revolution, and human solidarity.