Disappearances in the Post-Transition Era in Latin America


Book Description

The book identifies a new human rights phenomenon. While disappearances have tended to be associated with authoritarian state and armed conflict periods, this study looks at these acts carried out in procedural democracies where democratic institutions prevail.




Disappearances in Mexico


Book Description

This volume presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the practice of disappearances in Mexico, from the period of the so-called ‘dirty war’ to the current crisis of disappearances associated with the country’s ‘war on drugs’, during which more than 80,000 people have disappeared. The volume brings together contributions by distinguished scholars from Mexico, Argentina and Europe, who focus their chapters on four broad axes of enquiry. In Part I, chapters examine the phenomenon of disappearances in its historical and present-day forms, and the struggles for memory around the disappeared in Mexico with reference to Argentina. Part II addresses the political dimensions of disappearances, focusing on the specificities that this practice acquires in the context of the counterinsurgency struggle of the 1970s and the so-called ‘war on drugs’. The third section situates the issue within the framework of human rights law by examining the conceptual and legal aspects of disappearances. The final chapters explore the social movement of the relatives of the disappeared, showing how their search for disappeared loved ones involves bodily and affective experiences as well as knowledge production. The volume thus aims to further our understanding of the crisis of disappearances in Mexico without, however, losing sight of the historic origins of the phenomenon.




Human Rights Violations in Latin America


Book Description

A timely contribution to the study of peace psychology in Latin America, this volume describes clinical, psychosocial, and community interventions with victims from Mexico to Chile from the 1970s onward. Chapters analyze how to conceptualize complex processes such as the appropriation of children and political repression, raising psychological, juridical, and political implications for the victims, their families, human rights organizations, and society. Also included are studies and analyses of political processes in countries currently undergoing crises such as Venezuela and Colombia and the challenges posed by the peace process from a political psychology perspective. All authors present the results of studies or clinical cases illustrating creative methodologies and practices in different contexts. This book provides the context for differences in the victims' damages and the treatment approaches and methodologies adopted in each case. The authors outline psychological perspectives grounded in ethical and professional choices based on recognizing people's dignity while seeking rehabilitation and reparations for victims, families, and communities. It paves the way for reparations and rehabilitation, and ultimately to the establishment of democracy and peace in this part of the world. Readers will benefit from understanding the relationship between mental health and human rights understanding ethical and professional dimensions a broadened knowledge of working with victims




Victim Activists in Mexico


Book Description

Victim Activists in Mexico: Social and Political Mobilization amid Extreme Violence and Disappearances examines the collective action of the courageous family members of the disappeared in the midst of Mexico’s ongoing humanitarian crisis over the last decades. Yael Siman and Matthew Hone analyze this grassroots mobilization and argue that the activists have created rutinary, contentious, and innovative types of resistance through building local and trans-local links of support and solidarity that reinforce their struggle. This mobilization from below has contributed to constructing transitional justice including laws, public apologies, and memorials. The combination of internal and external factors impacting the collectives and their environment has enabled significant changes in the institutions, state responses, and the victimhood narratives in the country. This book adds to the scholarship on the collective action of grieving families by focusing on both the social and political aspects of mobilization.




A Post-Neoliberal Era in Latin America?


Book Description

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Ongoing conflicts between neoliberal and post-neoliberal politics have resulted in growing social instability in Latin America. This book explores the cultural dynamics of neoliberalism and anti-neoliberal resistance in Latin America as a complex set of interrelated cultural forms, examining the ways in which neoliberalism has transformed public discourses of self and social relationships, popular cultures and modes of everyday experience. Contributors from an international range of different disciplinary perspectives look at how Latin Americans construct subjectivities, build communities and make meaning in their everyday lives in order to analyse the discourses and cultural practices through which a societal consensus for the pursuit of neoliberal politics may be established, defended and contested.




The Two Faces of Fear


Book Description

In The Two Faces of Fear, Ana Villareal provides an in-depth study of how people live in a high-violence environment, drawing on two years of qualitative fieldwork conducted during a violent turf war in her hometown of Monterrey, Mexico. More broadly, Villareal puts forth a new approach to the study of fear and provides tangible evidence of how quickly fear worsens class, gender, race, and urban inequality beyond Mexico and the "war on drugs."




A History of Political Murder in Latin America


Book Description

A sweeping study of political murder in Latin America. This sweeping history depicts Latin America’s pan-regional culture of political murder. Unlike typical studies of the region, which often focus on the issues or trends of individual countries, this work focuses thematically on the nature of political murder itself, comparing and contrasting its uses and practices throughout the region. W. John Green examines the entire system of political murder: the methods and justifications the perpetrators employ, the victims, and the consequences for Latin American societies. Green demonstrates that elite and state actors have been responsible for most political murders, assassinating the leaders of popular movements and other messengers of change. Latin American elites have also often targeted the potential audience for these messages through the region’s various “dirty wars.” In spite of regional differences, elites across the region have displayed considerable uniformity in justifying their use of murder, imagining themselves in a class war with democratic forces. While the United States has often been complicit in such violence, Green notes that this has not been universally true, with US support waxing and waning. A detailed appendix, exploring political murder country by country, provides an additional resource for readers.




Society and New Paradigms


Book Description




Bodies, Territories and Serious Violations of Human Rights in Mexico


Book Description

This book seeks to contribute to the analysis of the serious violations of human rights in Mexico during the processes of democratic transition and the "War on Drugs" by taking bodies and territories as archives of the crimes committed by the Mexican State in the last decades. The text presents an analysis of the disappearance of persons, forced internal displacement, and gender violence as systematic expressions of State violence. These fields of research allow us to point out tensions between social practices and the institutional fragility that systematically denies human rights violations while at the same time ratifies and celebrates them. The thematic knotting between bodies and territories is anchored in the processes of shaping a memory that expresses State violence and presents the silenced resistances of minority social groups that elude the traditional forms of registration, control and collection of data. From these coordinates, body-territories are approached as scenarios where intersectionally-knotted violences unfold. The theoretical approaches considered are mobilized through a critical approach to capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy in order to analyze public policies and narratives related to the protection of bodies-territories, as well as the responses to the needs, interests and preferences of different groups and individuals whose lives are marked by the experience of serious human rights violations. Finally, this approach also considers the new ways in which crimes against humanity unfold in situations of democratic transition, as well as the forms of symbolic exchanges in the transmission of meaning and community bonding. Bodies, Territories and Serious Violations of Human Rights in Mexico will be of interest to academic researchers and graduate students in different fields of knowledge, such as criminology, sociology, history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology and the interdisciplinary field of human rights studies.




Repertoires of Terrorism


Book Description

Why do armed groups employ terrorism in markedly different ways during civil wars? Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Andreas E. Feldmann examines the disparate behavior of actors including guerrilla groups, state security forces, and paramilitaries during Colombia’s long and bloody civil war. Analyzing the varieties of violence in this conflict, he develops a new theory of the dynamics of terrorism in civil wars. Feldmann argues that armed groups’ distinct uses—repertoires—of terrorism arise from their particular organizational identities, the central and enduring attributes that distinguish one faction from other warring parties. He investigates a range of groups that took part in the Colombian conflict over the course of its evolution from ideological to criminal warfare, demonstrating that organizational identity plays a critical role in producing and rationalizing violence. Armed parties employ their unique repertoires as a means of communication to assert their relevance and territorial presence and to differentiate themselves from enemies and rivals. Repertoires of Terrorism is based on an extensive data set covering thousands of incidents, as well as interviews, archival research, and testimony. It sheds new light on both armed groups’ use of violence in Colombia’s civil war and the factors that shape terrorist activity in other conflicts.