•  buenos aires
• Thursday, December 08, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Although the public identifies human rights organisations in Latin America with resistance to the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, for years now these groups have broadened their concerns to encompass environmental and other issues.

Environmental conflicts over access to land and the use of natural resources, triggered by the polluting activities of oil or mining companies or by the expansion of large-scale agriculture at the expense of woodlands, are now among the top priorities of activists.

Also high up on the agenda of human rights defenders are violations of the rights of indigenous people, violence against women, and the rights of workers, immigrants and members of sexual minorities.

'The key issues on the new agenda arise from the tension caused when economic development clashes with the environment and human rights,' Gastón Chillier, executive director of the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), an Argentine human rights group, told IPS.

Chillier inaugurated the Dec. 5-6 meeting of Latin American human rights defenders organised by CELS in Buenos Aires, which drew more than 70 representatives from organisations in 14 countries in the region.

The aim of the meeting was to discuss the new issues of today, identify other actors — besides the state — who violate human rights, discuss the challenges faced by many human rights defenders, such as death threats and murder, and evaluate different mechanisms of protection at the local, national or regional levels.

'Today it is not only the state that violates human rights, but also companies, para-state agencies and organised crime,' said Chillier, who cited a number of activists killed recently in Argentina and other countries in Latin America.

CELS and many other human rights groups in Latin America emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, when most of the region was governed by authoritarian regimes that left thousands of people dead, 'disappeared', tortured or exiled.

The organisations, created by the families of victims of the dictatorships or by political leaders or human rights lawyers, spoke out about the abuses and demanded justice. But as democracy was restored in the region, their focus stretched to include police brutality and torture in prisons.

And their agenda continued to expand, to economic and social conflicts, in which the state is not necessarily the central actor in human rights violations. In Argentina, conflicts have mushroomed involving indigenous people and landless peasant farmers defending the use of common land and opposed to deforestation to make way for export crops like soybeans. The same thing is happening in other countries in the region, along with the emergence of conflicts with different industries.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service