Constitutionalising awareness and human rights in Latin America

Abstract

Human rights awareness in our region, only emerged from desperate societies for democracy and thus, human rights emerged as the basis of social pacts of these democracies that led to the re-founding of Latin American States. Democracy and its new paradigmatic axis, human rights, took the place of the dictatorships from our own traumas: more than fifty thousand dead and missing in the indigenous genocide of the Guatemala’s Rios Montt, the thirty thousand disappeared in Argentina’s Videla, the thousands of victims of reprisal in the Chile of Pinochet, of Banzer in Bolivia, Stroessner in Paraguay or in the Nicaragua, now free of the Somoza dynasty.