Human Rights and Basic Needs in the Americas and Human Rights in the Americas: The Struggle for Consensus are two scholarly anthologies searching for an elusive panacea. They are the result of various seminars organized by the Woodstock Theological Center, Washington, D.C., in which inquiries were made questioning the “intentions and scope of U.S. human rights policies” (p. 1, both works).
In her introduction to Human Rights and Basic Needs, Margaret Crahan traces the causes of authoritarianism in Latin America to the colonial period, when “an informal racial trichotomy emerged consisting of whites, the mixed groups, and the Indian-Negroes” (p. 26). Crahan ought to read the Codex Florentine, which evidences pre-Hispanic repression in Mesoamerica.
Crahan’s essay on “Evolution of the Military in Brazil, Chile, Peru, Venezuela and Mexico” identifies some factors contributing to violations of human rights. She states that the military was “prompted to turn out elected officials as a result of the loss of confidence in existing governments” (p. 90), and that this was guided by the military’s concern for the poor. Traditionally, however, elected regimes in Latin America generate torrents of human rights abuses in their attempts to elevate their members to comfortable economic plateaus. Mexico is a case in point. Frequently the military does not challenge corrupt governments; instead, its members join them.
John Weeks and Elizabeth Dore discuss basic needs and the difficulty in assessing the necessities of people in developing societies. Theoretically, they say, “rapid economic growth must eventually reach its way down the economic pyramid to affect the poorest” (p. 132), but they admit that this has not always been the case.
The fallacy is easy to explain. The “poorest” are economically, intellectually, and geographically handicapped, and individual will fails to persist.
Human Rights in the Americas: The Struggle for Consensus consists of a concatenation of essays, some of which are reviews of works by still another group of writers. Alfred Hennelly states that “one’s perception and articulation of the world is always conditioned by one’s social location, profession, status, wealth and race” (p. 128). I would add religion to this list.
The chapter on “Social Hermeneutic” describes the thoughts on the subject of poverty and repression of Segundo Galilea and others. Galilea is quoted as saying that “true conversion” to Christianity “is a commitment in favor of the oppressed” (p. 139). Nowhere do these writers differentiate between poverty and repression. Poverty is a question of degree, not of kind, and the idea that poverty is synonymous with oppression naturally encourages the poor to rebellion, without assurances of minimal gains.
Ignacio Ellacuria in his “Human Rights in a Divided Society” states that “society cannot be what it is or do what it should do if it does not have sufficient material resources at the disposition of all and each one of its members …” (p. 53). The problem is that most societies cannot meet this standard, while those that appear to enjoy “sufficient material resources” often find themselves plagued by periodic recessions.
Written in the style of the grand theorists, with sweeping perspectives and vast generalizations, these books are illuminating for the patient reader, who will surely find food for thought. The urgent need to mobilize birth control against population pressures—the primary cause of misery, poverty, destitution, and repression—is ignored by every one of these writers. Nothing destabilizes a democratic society more than an unchecked population.
These scholars should pay attention to the words of Indira Gandhi: “all efforts at education, health, employment, and above all, housing, are in vain against this sea of human beings ….”
An index to both of these books would have been helpful.
