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Human Rights Contention in Latin America: A Comparative Study

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Abstract

This paper reports original data on contentious challenges, especially protests, focused on human rights in seven Latin American countries from 1981 to 1995. An analysis reveals that human rights contentious challenges are most prevalent where human rights abuses are worse and authoritarianism is present and in countries that are more urbanized. However, the incidence of such human rights contentious challenges is not related to the number of human rights organizations (HROs) in the country. Results also suggest two different types of human rights contention. National human rights movements, present in Argentina and Guatemala, involved HROs and demanded improvements in the national human rights situation. The other form is ancillary human rights protest, in which human rights challenges are led by a variety of groups, focus on repression particular to the groups involved and are either short-lived or part of a more general wave of opposition. This form of contention was more prevalent in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

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Notes

  1. Before any data were collected, I used the Stata program to draw a global random sample of countries. I began the data collection process with the selected Latin American countries, since I am most familiar with this region. Once the enormity of the data collection task became apparent, I limited the project to the seven Latin American countries that were selected. While this is a subsample, it is still random since each Latin American country had an equal probability of being selected.

  2. This dynamic indicator of the number of human rights organizations is highly correlated (r = .86) for this sample with estimates of the number of human rights organizations in 1989 and 1994 presented by Cleary (1997).

  3. Simmons (2009) proposed that human rights mobilization would be greatest in what she calls partially democratic transitional regimes, as opposed to stable autocracies or stable democracies. This hypothesis was also tested with a dummy variable that was coded as one from the time an election is announced or opposition parties are legalized under an authoritarian regime until either authoritarianism is reinstated or until the first democratically elected government finishes its term in office. This transition variable was included in the regression analysis discussed below and was found to not be significantly related to the number of human rights contentious challenges in a country.

  4. The negative binomial regression model is similar to Poisson regression, but adds a parameter, α, that measures dispersion. For the model estimated, a likelihood ratio test shows that α is significantly greater than 0, thus indicating that binomial regression is the appropriate method.

  5. Another concern in panel data analysis is the heterogeneity across subjects. Stata has fixed-effects and random-effects version of negative binomial regression models that are designed to account for the heterogeneity of panel data sets. However, Allison (2009) recommends against the fixed-effects negative binomial model, and the likelihood-ratio test associated with a random-effects model similar to the one analyzed in Table 2 indicates that the estimates are not significantly different from the standard negative binomial regression model. Another method to account for heterogeneity is to include dummy variables for all but one of the cross-sectional units (i.e., countries), but this complicates interpretation by “assigning much of its systematic variation to dummy atheoretical variables which are collinear with explanatory variables” (Stimson 1985, 922).

  6. Where forceful seizures injure or kill people, they are considered violent attacks.

  7. This includes government actions made up to 2 months following a particular challenge as well as concessions made to head off a planned challenge that occurred anyway. Actions that happened longer than 2 months after the challenge would be considered a concession if news reports tie it explicitly to that challenge.

  8. For specific human rights demands, 27.3 % of the challenges won concessions, and for general demands, 11.9 % won concessions.

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Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Haley Beffel and Kim Eckart for their research assistance and Whitney Franklin for her editorial assistance.

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  1. Department of Politics and Government, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH, 43015, USA

    James C. Franklin

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Franklin, J.C. Human Rights Contention in Latin America: A Comparative Study. Hum Rights Rev 15, 139–158 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-013-0283-1

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