The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, recently called for the end to all forms of violence and a return to peaceful dialogue in response to Colombia’s recent protests by a wide range of civil society groups and trade unions disillusioned by the failure of the 2016 peace agreement to resolve the root cause of inequality. At present, Latin America may be characterized as a region which has enjoyed an epoch of “long peace”, due to the lack of inter-state wars, but a diametric rise in intra-state violence, evidenced by its ranking as having the highest level of violence in the world and in particular having the highest levels of violence against workers and women. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Latin America
Proportionality, Exception, and Transformation in Times of Pandemics: Expanding the Spectrum of Constitutional Relevance
As the literature on authoritarian constitutionalism and democratic decay has repeatedly remarked, there are several factors that distinguish the wave of neo-authoritarianism that currently travels the world from earlier instantiations of the genre. One of them is the fact that contemporary neo-authoritarians do not outlaw the opposition, cancel elections, shut down the media, or violently repress social discontent, but rather use softer and often legally admissible ways of advancing their agenda – generating patterns of gradual but sustained and ever deeper democratic erosion, instead of sudden collapse. A second distinguishing factor is that the current authoritarian wave affects as much “new” democracies that have experienced rule-of-law and democratic-quality problems for long, as prestigious constitutional democracies we considered to be exceedingly consolidated. There is a sort of unexpected levelling-down, “equalization-in-the-bad” component to current developments. Continue reading