An Expanding Definition of Human Rights Down South
By Wesley Carrington
October 2007
My experience walking through a Buenos Aires slum with a group of seminary students, narrated below, demonstrates the challenges the Buenos Aires government faces in its goal to guarantee freedom from poverty. The profound poverty and inequality in Buenos Aires are increasingly being tackled by the government through a state-centric philosophy that uses rights-based language. The government’s desire to create socioeconomic rights for all citizens was a constant theme that surfaced during my internship at the Buenos Aires Ministry of Human Rights.
As we walked through a suburb of Buenos Aires, the paved street eventually gave way to a dirt road; the quality of the houses deteriorated in much the same manner. Piles of garbage lined the dirt path as well as shacks made of corrugated sheet metal, plywood, cardboard, and other readily available materials. A smoky haze had settled over the villa humilde because of burning garbage nearby. Blaring cumbre music seemed to emanate from each shack that we passed. Dirt-smeared toddlers stumbled from one garbage pile to another. Older children played with various objects pulled from the junk strewn across the hillsides adjacent to the polluted canal.
Later, we stood before a middle-aged woman in her courtyard fenced in with random bits of plywood nailed together. As she sipped on her yerba mate, a pig at her feet rooted around in the mud and roosters pecked at the dirt. Welcoming us over to the open fire on which hissed a cast-iron pot, she talked about the family’s poverty and difficulties in a scratchy voice until she was interrupted by her husband. He introduced himself jovially in a drunken slur before stumbling back into the shack. The woman’s children appeared every now and then, running around the yard with a little girl hauling the family’s infant child around. A few minutes later, the girl, while trying to wrest the infant through the door of the shack in a salvaged stroller, caught the wheels on the corner of a cement block and caused the stroller to go tipping and crashing to the ground, with the infant’s wails soon following.
As I wandered through the slum, I wondered how this could be the same Argentina I had left just hours earlier, the modern and prosperous Buenos Aires full of sleek steel skyscrapers and wide European boulevards? The abject poverty seen in the villas on the outskirts of the city was certainly a stark contrast to the relatively wealthy who lived in the city center and sent their neat, uniform-clad children to private schools.
My time in Argentina demonstrated that theories of development are more than just coffeehouse philosophy. The city government’s attitude of obligation toward the poor shaped the arc of all its programs. One of the Human Rights Ministry’s roles is to receive consultations from those people whose human rights have been violated, are in an emergency housing situation, or are seeking social services. Although Argentina is in many ways still a developing country, I was continually surprised by the breadth of the government’s social welfare and safety net programs that were geared toward those in the most dire straits of poverty. There were various forms of monthly subsidies for the poor, from emergency housing stipends to payments to the disabled. There were emergency hotline numbers, groups of city employees scouring the streets for homeless children, homeless shelters, and free day care for the city’s residents living in some of the poorest neighborhoods.
More striking than the sheer number of programs directed at the poor, however, was the Ministry’s pervading philosophy toward the plight of the poor. Decades of free market, neo-liberal trumpeting by the United States has failed to prevent a resurgence of statist economics and increased government involvement in social welfare programs throughout Latin America. This state-led trend was manifested through the paradigm of “economic human rights” at the Ministry. My supervisor, Emelina, explained the Ministry’s rights-based stance toward social welfare during a discrimination training session that was put on for city social workers: “In the eighteenth century, there were various revolutions for liberty and equality, the goal of which was to achieve freedom from government interference through a democratic system of governance. However, this was not enough.” Emelina went on to speak of the “rights” of education, health, and social services for society’s most vulnerable citizens. The Buenos Aires government, as guarantor of these socio-economic rights, has the obligation to ensure that the poorest people in the city are accessing the city’s social welfare programs and that their lot is being improved.
As a United States citizen, where freedom from government influence is often heralded as the most highly prized right and considered sufficient in itself, it was somewhat incongruous to hear a more “progressive” message of positive socio-economic rights guaranteed by the government from a supposedly developing country. Another poignant moment during my internship occurred when I told Emelina that I had gone to a slum with a group from my church in order to help serve food to the poor children that lived there. To my surprise, rather than lauding a volunteer group helping poor people, her face took on a concerned look and she began to emphatically explain a distinction that seemed very important to her. “The church gives handout ‘assistance’ to poor people, but the goal of the government is to say, ‘these are your rights, you have a right to this subsidy or payment, and you should come to our offices to demand it.’” Emelina characterized the church’s social work as “a little gift to help a little poor person,” while the city government’s goal was to build a regime where socioeconomic ascendancy was a right to be demanded, like freedom of speech or property rights.
Yet, for all of the government’s supposed “guarantees”, this human right was still conceptual. Otherwise there would be no need—no poverty—for the church’s social work in the villa. There remained a disconnect between what I was hearing from the Ministry about everyone already having socioeconomic rights and the concrete reality of poverty still on display in the villa. Although Argentina is one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America, 27% of its people still live below the poverty line. Perhaps the government just needed time, more resources, or both.
As my summer internship at the Ministry progressed, I began to think a lot about the role of government regarding socioeconomic status. Are human rights merely negative rights to be free from government violence, interference, or deprivation of liberty? Or, are there also fundamental positive socioeconomic human rights that government should ensure, making the government a guarantor of socioeconomic ascendancy? I wonder about the villa I visited and the poverty-stricken people I met there. Was it the government’s job to raise them up to the upper-middle class status that many people in the center of Buenos Aires enjoyed? Would government money alone be enough to better the fortunes of Argentina’s poor?
The Buenos Aires government policies seem like a rejection of the Washington Consensus, a U.S. attempt to convince Latin Americans of the priority of tight fiscal restraint and liberal trade policies in order to make the country attractive to outside investors. However, even if the Consensus’s prediction of macroeconomic success wouldn’t raise all boats (or even most), I doubt whether more government money would either. Even if the so-called Washington Consensus wasn’t gospel truth, I am skeptical whether increased government spending on social programs was a long-term solution. Government handouts might improve the lot of poor Argentines in the short run, but generating increased job opportunities and incomes would require more policy than the mere declaration of economic rights and the bulking up of welfare programs.
Shortly before I left Buenos Aires, a new mayor was resoundingly elected to the dismay of many in the Ministry. Mauricio Macri, the new mayor, is a fiscally conservative businessman who will likely bring into office a different conception of the role of government in guaranteeing socio-economic rights. As I left, the head of the office and many others in the Ministry had already resigned, seeing unwelcome changes in human rights philosophy looming in the future. Regardless of whether Macri’s policies lead to greater prosperity and well-being for the people of Buenos Aires, his ministers will likely discard the rights-based paradigm of economic development that I experienced at the Ministry. It will be interesting to monitor how the concept of state-led development and economic human rights continues to evolve in Buenos Aires and throughout Latin America.
The writer is currently in his second year at the University of Iowa College of Law.