Learn More

Why does HRF focus its work on democracy?

Article 7 of the Inter-American Democratic Charter states: “Democracy is indispensable for the effective exercise of fundamental freedoms and human rights.” Defining and linking these concepts took the American continent over 50 years. During this time, countless systematic human rights violations went unpunished. Among the most bloody and visible are the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, the Castro regime in Cuba, and the South American dictatorships of Pinochet in Chile, Videla in Argentina, Banzer in Bolivia, and Stroessner in Paraguay, among other South American military governments who collaborated in the brutal Condor Operation.

In 1948, the American states signed two key documents: the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the Charter of the OAS. The Declaration was the first international human rights document in the world, while the OAS Charter created an organization to defend them. In order to fulfill its mission, the OAS created the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1959. Ten years later, the OAS approved the American Convention on Human Rights, which, along with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, completed the current inter-American system for human rights protection.

Despite the important and expert work carried out by the Commission and the Court consisting of drafting reports and prosecuting specific human rights offenses, the OAS has been unable to prevent the formation of political structures that inevitably lead to systematic human rights violations. To correct this reality, the OAS adopted the Inter-American Democratic Charter as the culmination of a long and slow process towards the formulation of principles, rules, and mechanisms geared at identifying and punishing those governments that systematically violate human rights.

Nearly 10 years have passed since the enactment of this historical document, and the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is ever more convinced that its mission as a nongovernmental organization that defends human rights in the Americas includes the obligation to promote and defend democracy by denouncing those governments that violate it. HRF believes that activism for individual cases and isolated human rights violations is ineffective unless it is combined with contextualized work aimed at separating democratic regimes guilty of isolated cases of human rights abuses from those anti-democratic regimes guilty of systematic human rights violations.

Click here to learn more about the OAS democracy clause.
Click here to read the letters of the “Mr. Insulza and the Democratic Charter” project.
Click here to read the report “The Facts and the Law behind the Democratic Crisis of Honduras, 2009.”

Is the dichotomy between the “left” and the “right” relevant for democracy in Latin America?

Hitler’s Germany, Lenin and Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mussolini’s Italy, Mao’s China, Marcos’s Philipines, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea, Franco’s Spain, Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, Videla’s Argentina, Fujimori’s Perú, Pinochet’s Chile, and Castro’s Cuba all differ greatly. Some of these dictatorships rose to power through coup d’états (Lenin, Mussolini, Pinochet), and others through democratic elections (Marcos, Hitler, Fujimori). Some called themselves “right-wing” (Franco and Pinochet) and others “left-wing” (Pol Pot and Castro), and all professed different ideological creeds (Nazism, Communism, Fascism, Nationalism).

Without exception, however, all these dictatorial regimes had the same manner of operating:

They used the police, armed forces, or groups of civilian supporters to threaten, harass, persecute, imprison or kill citizens who opposed the government.
They harassed members of opposition parties until they achieved a single-party regime or weakened all opposition down to small subservient parties.
They harassed independent politicians and judges until they fully controlled all branches of government: the executive (police, armed forces, and foreign relations), the legislative (the power to create and modify laws at will), and the judiciary (the power to interpret and apply the laws against opponents).
They threatened, harassed, persecuted, and imprisoned independent media and journalists, i.e. the media and journalists who criticized or did not revere them. They also spent tax-payer’s money in state propaganda.

The bloody history of the 20th century has demonstrated that beyond the self-proclaimed ideologies and speeches that separate governments, there are objective factors that draw a line between democratic regimes that protect the human rights of their citizens and anti-democratic regimes that oppress them. The Inter-American Democratic Charter is, to date, the only international legal instrument that has defined these objective elements (sections 3 and 4) as binding for all States, and that has established a procedure for sanctioning those governments who violate them (articles 17 to 21). The democracy clause enshrined in the Inter-American Democratic Charter forbids any government that behaves like the repressive regimes of the 20th century to sit as a member state of the OAS.

What is the OAS and who is Insulza?

What is the OAS?

The Organization of American States (OAS) is the world’s oldest regional organization, dating back to the First International Conference of American States, which was held in Washington, D.C. from October 1889 to April 1890. At that conference, the establishment of the International Union of American Repub-lics was approved and the stage was set for the weaving together of a web of provisions and institutions that came to be known as the inter-American system, the oldest of the international institutional systems.

The OAS came into being in 1948 with the signing, in Bogotá, Colombia, of the Charter of the OAS. The Charter entered into force in December 1951 and was subsequently amended by the Protocol of Buenos Aires, which was signed in 1967 and which entered into force in February 1970; by the Protocol of Car-tagena de Indias, which was signed in 1985 and which entered into force in November 1988; by the Protocol of Managua, which was signed in 1993 and which entered into force on January 29, 1996; and by the Protocol of Washington, which was signed in 1992 and which entered into force on Septem-ber 25, 1997.

The OAS was established to achieve among its member states, as stated in Article 1 of its Charter, “an order of peace and justice, to promote their solidarity, to strengthen their collaboration, and to defend their sovereignty, their territorial integrity, and their independence.” Today it comprises the 35 independent states of the Americas and has granted permanent observer status to 63 states, as well as to the European Union. The Organization of American States constitutes the principal political, juridical, and social governmental forum in the Hemisphere.

The OAS uses a four-pronged approach to effectively implement its essential purposes, based on its pil-lars: democracy, human rights, security, and development.

Article 2 of the Charter of the OAS states that:

"The Organization of American States, in order to put into practice the principles on which it is founded and to fulfill its regional obligations under the Charter of the United Nations, proclaims the following es-sential purposes:

To strengthen the peace and security of the continent;
To promote and consolidate representative democracy, with due respect for the principle of non-intervention;
To prevent possible causes of difficulties and to ensure the pacific settlement of disputes that may arise among the Member States;
To provide for common action on the part of those States in the event of aggression;
To seek the solution of political, juridical, and economic problems that may arise among them;
To promote, by cooperative action, their economic, social, and cultural development;
To eradicate extreme poverty, which constitutes an obstacle to the full democratic development of the peoples of the hemisphere; and
To achieve an effective limitation of conventional weapons that will make it possible to devote the largest amount of resources to the economic and social development of the Member States."

This description was taken from the OAS site, here.
Read the OAS Charter here.
Read the Inter-American Democratic Charter here.

Who is Insulza?

Biography

José Miguel Insulza was elected OAS Secretary General on May 2, 2005, and took office on May 26 of that year. The Chilean politician has an accomplished record of public service in his country. At the beginning of his five-year term as Secretary General, he pledged to strengthen the Organization’s “political relevance and its capacity for action.”

A lawyer by profession, he has a law degree from the University of Chile, did postgraduate studies at the Latin American Social Sciences Faculty (FLACSO), and has a master’s in political science from the University of Michigan. Until 1973, he was Professor of Political Theory at the University of Chile and of Political Science at Chile’s Catholic University. He also served, until that year, as Political Advisor to the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Director of the Diplomatic Academy of Chile.

He became involved in politics during his student years and served as Vice President of the Chilean Students Association, President of the Center for Law Students of the University of Chile, and Presi-dent of the Union of University Federations of Chile.

In the early 1970s, Insulza played an active role in Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government and, following the coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet into power, he went into exile for 15 years, first in Rome (1974-1980) and after that in Mexico (1981-1988). In Mexico City, he was a researcher and then Director of the United States Studies Institute in the Center for Economic Research and Teaching. He also taught at Mexico's National Autonomous University, the Ibero-American Uni-versity, and the Diplomatic Studies Institute.

Insulza was able to return to Chile in early 1988 and joined the Coalition of Parties for Democracy, the coalition that won the plebiscite against the Pinochet regime in October of that year and that has been victorious in all democratic elections in the country since 1990. A member of the Socialist Par-ty, he has held a large number of high-level posts in the Coalition governments.

Under the presidency of Patricio Aylwin, Insulza served as Chilean Ambassador for International Co-operation, Director of Multilateral Economic Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Vice Pres-ident of the International Cooperation Agency.

In March 1994, under the administration of President Eduardo Frei, Insulza became Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs and in September of that year was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. In 1999, he became Minister Secretary General of the Presidency, and the following year he became President Ricardo Lagos’s Minister of the Interior and Vice President of the Republic. When he left that post in May 2005, he had served as a government minister for more than a decade, the longest continuous tenure for a minister in Chilean history.

Born on June 2, 1943, Insulza is married to Georgina Núñez Reyes and has three children: Francisca, Javier and Daniel.

This biography was taken from the OAS website, here.