Landman, Todd --- "Development, Democracy and Human Rights in Latin America, 1976–2000" [2006] ELECD 78; in Dine, Janet; Fagan, Andrew (eds), "Human Rights and Capitalism" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: Human Rights and Capitalism

Editor(s): Dine, Janet; Fagan, Andrew

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845422684

Section: Chapter 13

Section Title: Development, Democracy and Human Rights in Latin America, 1976–2000

Author(s): Landman, Todd

Number of pages: 28

Extract:

13. Development, democracy and human
rights in Latin America, 1976­2000
Todd Landman

I. INTRODUCTION
The final decades of the 20th century in Latin America saw a large number of
economic, political and legal changes. Countries in the region saw a general
economic transformation from a Keynesian state-led model of development
to a more neo-liberal model, which has been largely driven by external forces
related to the region's extraction from the debt crisis through the imposition
of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) by the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (Brohman 1996). Complementing this shift from
state-led to market-led economic development, many countries in the region
experienced transitions from authoritarian rule. Starting with the Peruvian
transition in 1978 and ending with the Mexican transition in 2000, a wave of
democratisation has spread across the region such that Latin America has
joined the `democratic universe' even though the experience has been punctu-
ated by democratic setbacks in Fujimoro's Peru, Chavez's Venezuela, and to a
lesser extent Menem's Argentina and Cardoso's Brazil (Foweraker, Landman
and Harvey 2003). Alongside these economic and political changes, the re-
gion has also emerged as a key terrain for the human rights movement.
Through the promulgation of new constitutions (or the resurrection of old
ones) and through ratification of international and regional human rights
instruments, countries in the region have made new and extensive commit-
ments to the de jure protection of human rights. On the ground, however,
...