TY - JOUR
AU - Franklin, James, C
AB - Abstract This research examines the impact of human rights protests on human rights abuses in seven Latin American countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. I find that protests focused broadly on human rights are associated with significant declines in human rights abuses, controlling for important factors from previous studies. Furthermore, I argue that it is important to distinguish political repression (abuses that target political activists) from coercive state oppression, which has nonpolitical targets. These two types of abuses respond to different factors, but broadly focused human rights protests are found to decrease both types of abuses. I argue further that a strong human rights movement, indicated by frequent human rights protests, discourages the police abuses associated with oppression by raising the likelihood of accountability for such abuses, including by improving the likelihood of reforms to the criminal justice system. Introduction Over the decades since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the world has witnessed growing recognition of human rights standards and the proliferation of human rights institutions. While there have been notable gains in human rights, the creation of standards and institutions has not been sufficient to push recalcitrant states to consistently respect the rights of their citizens. Prominent theories emphasize the importance of human rights movements in pressuring for lasting improvements in human rights. There are certainly cases in which human rights movements and their mobilization of protests helped achieve such successes, but there are also cases to the contrary. This research goes beyond previous studies by comparing levels of human rights protests with the severity of human rights abuses across several countries. However, a more complete understanding of the effect of protests requires the unpacking of two concepts. First, human rights have often been studied with a theory on political repression, which has been powerful, but a perusal of human rights reports reveals that many human rights abuses are apolitical in that they do not target victims for political reasons. These actions are called coercive state oppression, and it is argued that this form of abuse is less likely to respond to democracy or political violence. This paper develops indicators of these two forms of human rights abuses. Second, I argue that we must unpack protests to carefully consider the demands of protesters. I argue that protests focused on human rights should be a factor in reducing these abuses but only when these are generalized human rights protests focused on out-group abuses. In this paper I expand on these theoretical points and provide an analysis of seven Latin American countries that finds that generalized human rights protests are associated with reductions in both types of human rights abuses. Human Rights Protests and Political Repression The growth of international human rights standards and monitoring has been remarkable. Korey (1998), Stammers (2009), and Tsutsui, Whitlinger, and Lim (2012) see human rights movements or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as a crucial factor in this development. However, Stammers (2009) and Tsutsui and Smith (2019) assert that scholars only began to seriously address the role of social movements in human rights in the late 1990s. Tarrow (2011, 9) defines social movements as “collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities.” Tarrow (2011, 9) adds that movements “characteristically mount contentious challenges through disruptive direct action.” Social movements are distinct from NGOs in that a social movement may encompass various formal organizations (along with activists who are not members of these organizations) or may exist without formal organization at all. The focus on contentious challenges emphasizes that protest is a primary tactic of social movements, and there are good theoretical reasons to expect that human rights protests within countries can reduce human rights abuses. Risse and Sikkink's (1999) spiral model posits a process of gradual reduction in repression and institutionalization of human rights in a repressive country. They argue that international human rights pressure can empower domestic opposition, and that the combination of domestic and international pressure may lead to tactical concessions by the government that open the door to fundamental improvement in human rights over time. Simmons (2009) argues that human rights treaties encourage domestic political mobilization on human rights, which leads to greater respect for human rights. There have been studies of particular human rights movements, many of which have seen them as making important contributions to reducing human rights violations, including studies of Argentina (Brysk 1993, 1994), Chile (Ropp and Sikkink 1999), Czechoslovakia (Thomas 1999), Guatemala (Ropp and Sikkink 1999), Indonesia (Jetschke 1999), Kenya (Schmitz 1999), Mexico (Muñoz 2009), Morocco (Gränzer 1999), the Philippines (Jetschke 1999), Poland (Thomas 1999), South Africa (Black 1999), Tunisia (Van Hüllen 2012), and Turkey (Cizre 2001). However, case studies on China (Kinzelbach 2012), Colombia (Brysk 2009), and Tunisia (Gränzer 1999) found that domestic mobilization and international pressure was not effective in the 1980s and 1990s. The overall conclusions by Risse and Ropp (1999) to case studies applying the spiral model were largely positive. However, Jetschke and Liese (2013) reviewed subsequent case studies with regard to the spiral model and admitted that “domestic mobilization is hard to come by and sustain” (29). They also noted the complicating factor of democratic regimes that still violate human rights. As we will see, this is an important consideration in the cases studied here. These case studies are an important contribution as they provide rich detail on protests and actions by international actors, but they typically lack a consistent measure of mobilization and human rights progress to facilitate cross-national comparison. Quantitative studies, discussed below, have found a number of consistent factors that explain political repression across a wide range of cases, but they rarely analyze the role of protests. When they do consider human rights mobilization, they typically analyze counts of human rights organizations (Loveman 1998; Ball 2000; Tsutsui and Wotipka 2004; Cardenas 2007; Murdie and Davis 2011), rather than actual collective action on human rights. My research here seeks to bridge these approaches through analysis of detailed measures of human rights protests and consideration of causal mechanisms not seen in earlier quantitative studies, while also providing cross-national comparison that can control for standard factors found to explain repression in quantitative research. Broader Context Over the past roughly thirty years, a quantitative literature has developed analyzing why governments violate an important subset of human rights, namely physical integrity rights, which includes political imprisonment, torture, extrajudicial executions, and disappearances (Cardenas 2007). Social scientists have also used the term political repression to describe the use of these actions by governments. This term presupposes that governments violate these rights in order to protect themselves against threats to their power. Davenport (2007) summarizes the three most consistent findings from the literature on political repression: dissent provokes, repression persists, and democracies pacify. First, political repression is more likely when citizens engage in acts of political dissent, ranging from demonstrations to civil war. The strong impact of civil war was a key finding from the influential study by Poe and Tate (1994) and a recent, thorough study by Hill and Jones (2014) found that civil war is by far the best predictor of political repression. More focused studies on responses to particular acts of dissent found that acts of dissent that use violence or other confrontational tactics are more likely to result in political repression (Shin 1983; Earl, Soule, and McCarthy 2003; Earl and Soule 2006; Franklin 2009; Soule and Davenport 2009; Ayoub 2010). Davenport's (2007) second conclusion—that repression persists—refers to the consistent finding that governments that were repressive in the previous year are more likely to be repressive in the current year. This finding may be explained, in part, by the “stickiness” of the predominant repression measures (Hafner-Burton and Ron 2009). Fariss (2014) suggests that the stability in human rights measures may be explained, in part, by the changing standards of measurement over time. He corrects for this and finds greater improvements in human rights than is suggested by the Political Terror Scale (PTS) or the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Physical Integrity Rights Index. However, there is likely still a persistence of repression, as governments and security personnel who have routinely used repression in the past may face great inertia in ending these practices in the future. The third conclusion—that democracies pacify—refers to the consistent finding from global studies that democracies are less repressive than authoritarian regimes (Henderson 1991; Poe and Tate 1994), though some studies have found that there is a threshold effect in which repression is reduced at only high levels of democracy (Davenport and Armstrong 2004; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005). Davenport (2007) disaggregates democracy into voice (including mass participation and representation) and veto (the ability of other political elites to block government actions) and finds that voice has the stronger effect in reducing repression. The logic here is that citizens disapprove of repression, leading them to vote against leaders who engage in it. There are other possible factors beyond these three that have been found to influence political repression. Hill and Jones (2014) provide a comprehensive test of aggregate factors in political repression, and besides civil war and democratic indicators, they find that youth demographic bulges, judicial independence, a common law tradition, constitutional provisions for fair trials, oil dependence, and preferential trade agreements with human rights requirements help to predict political repression. In general, they find that international factors are less important than domestic factors. However, as mentioned above, Brysk (1993) and Risse and Sikkink (1999) hypothesized the importance of international pressure in combination with domestic pressure. International pressure, especially in regard to naming and shaming violating governments, has received mixed results in quantitative studies, as Hafner-Burton (2008) finds no impact for shaming, while Franklin (2008) and Murdie and Davis (2011) find that shaming reduces repression, in combination with other factors. Repression and Oppression Thus, most previous theory and research assumes political repression, in which governmental leaders use violence or restrictions in order to reduce or eliminate a threat to their power (Goldstein 1978). This has been a powerful theory, but as Haschke (2017) observed, a close examination of human rights reports shows that there are many human rights abuses targeting individuals who pose no discernable threat to those in power. Thus, we need to expand our concepts of human rights abuses. Haschke (2017) distinguishes political/repressive and nonpolitical/nonrepressive physical integrity rights violations. In analyzing torture under democracy, Rejali (2007) distinguishes torture used for national security from torture used as part of the criminal justice system or as a means to intimidate the socially marginalized. Crabtree and Davenport (2018) distinguish between repression, which they see as acts of physical violence against political targets, and oppression, which refers to acts of physical violence in which targets are not political. Young (1988) argued that oppression encompasses five faces: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Especially relevant here is violence, and Young (1988, 287) argues that while repressive violence is used by rulers “as a coercive tool to maintain their power,” oppressive violence refers to “random, unprovoked attacks…which have no motive but to damage, humiliate or destroy the person.” Stahl (2017), furthermore, distinguishes three types of oppression: coercive, resource, and normative. An additional important characteristic of oppression according to Stahl (2017) is that social groups play a critical role, as targets are members of disadvantaged social groups, and dominant groups tend to benefit. Haugen and Boutros (2014) argue that such abuses are widespread in less-developed countries. Along these lines, Huggins and Mesquita (1995) argue that police violence in Latin America tends to target those who are politically powerless. Furthermore, a study by Birkbeck and Gabaldon (1998) of police officers in Venezuela shows that they are more likely to support the use of force against socially marginalized individuals. Coercive oppression is getting close to these types of abuses, except that these actions are undertaken by agents of the state, while the actions referenced by Young and Stahl are not necessarily sanctioned by the state. Thus, I argue that the appropriate term for nonpolitical abuses carried out by agents of the state is coercive state oppression. Therefore, we can distinguish two varieties of human rights abuses. Political repression involves violent or forceful actions by authorities against supposed political opponents. We cannot see into the minds of political leaders to discern what they find threatening, but we can observe the targets of coercion, and in the case of political repression, the targets are politically active in some way as rebels, members of a political party, protesters, etc. Coercive state oppression involves violent or forceful actions by authorities taken against individuals who are not involved in political opposition activities and who tend to be from socially marginalized groups. I will also refer to these as political abuses versus apolitical abuses. Figure 1 categorizes various types of coercive actions. The key distinction here is between political repression and coercive state oppression. To aid in interpreting examples, the vertical axis in Figure 1 indicates a secondary distinction, the scale of coercion, which can be measured according to the number of victims. The highest scale of political repression is politicide, which Harff (2003) defines as sustained policies approved by governing elites that intend to destroy groups who oppose the regime and dominant groups. An example from the countries examined here is the Argentine Dirty War, which sought to eradicate subversion once and for all by disappearing, torturing, and killing thousands. One might argue that the highest scale of coercive state oppression would be genocide, which refers to sustained policies approved by governing elites that intend to destroy groups primarily defined by their communal characteristics, rather than their political attributes (Harff, 2003). However, at this scale, it is often difficult to distinguish political actors from nonpolitical actors. As Valentino (2004) demonstrated, prominent cases of genocide are carried out by governments perceiving high levels of threat to their power. Thus, these actions are a combination of the political threat of political repression with the bigotry of oppression, so genocide is portrayed at the midpoint between the two categories. More clearly fitting the definition of coercive state oppression, at a somewhat lower scale, are the extrajudicial executions by police or vigilante death squads targeting homeless youths, which occurred in Brazil during the period studied here. Lower still are routine local-level police abuses of criminal suspects. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Typology and examples of state coercion Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Typology and examples of state coercion Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Means of human rights variables across seven countries Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Means of human rights variables across seven countries Explaining Political Repression and Coercive State Oppression The distinction between these two types of human rights abuses is important because, theoretically, they should respond to different factors. Political repression should be more prevalent where measures of political threat, such as civil wars or other acts of rebellion, are present. Coercive state oppression, however, could well occur in the absence of political threats. As Haschke (2017) argues, there should also be a differential impact for democracy. Electoral democracy should reduce the amount of political repression, as argued by Davenport (2007). The targets of political repression are, by definition, those who are involved in politics, and once electoral democracy is established, these former victims are, again by definition, allowed to freely participate in the political process. As mentioned above, Davenport argued that an especially important aspect of this relationship is voice, in which people can use their political participation to remove repressive leaders from office. However, this logic does not apply as well if we consider groups that have little political voice because they are from the margins of society. Thus, we should not expect that establishing an electoral democracy will necessarily reduce apolitical abuses, and as Haschke (2017) points out, abuses targeting nonpolitical groups are surprisingly common in democracies. Violent and discriminatory policing, abusive prisons, and a socially biased judicial system could easily coexist with competitive elections for power. Indeed, elected leaders may support stamping out crime by any means necessary to avoid being labeled “soft on crime.” Furthermore, even when elected leaders want to reduce apolitical abuses, they may still have difficulty stopping them. Haschke (2017) argues that such abuses are carried out at the behest of government agents rather than political executives (as is the case with political repression). Reforming judicial and police institutions may be needed to reduce these abuses, but this can be very difficult and expensive, and would likely face entrenched opposition (Fuentes 2004). This is where an active human rights movement may be most consequential. As mentioned above, a fundamental feature of any movement is participation in contentious action. The question is what kinds of contentious challenges should be included? We can consider three levels of specificity. At the broadest level, Teorell (2010), Chenoweth and Stephan (2011), and Haggard and Kaufman (2016) show that nonviolent resistance is relatively effective in achieving regime change. This suggests that nonviolent action would also be capable of decreasing human rights abuses. On the other hand, demands matter in government responses (Gamson 1990). Governments may only improve respect for human rights in response to protests focused on human rights demands. Franklin (2014) studied human rights protests and argued for distinguishing human rights protests with general versus specific demands. This is potentially an important distinction here. Some protests may be focused on human rights issues but only as they apply to the participating group. We can call these particularistic human rights protests. For example, members of a political party may take part in a demonstration protesting that one of their leaders was arrested. However, groups that are protesting sanctions against themselves may not be as willing to advocate for disadvantaged out-groups. Thus, it is important to consider human rights protests that do focus on out-groups. We can call these generalized human rights protests, and I propose that they indicate a willingness to take a stand for human rights more generally, including abuses against politically powerless and socially marginalized groups. This suggests, then, that generalized human rights protests will tend to reduce human rights abuses across the board, including coercive state oppression. There are two potential causal mechanisms for this. First, Birkbeck and Gabaldon (1998) argue that police are more likely to use violence when they perceive that successful complaints from the victims are less likely. Furthermore, they argue that police perceive socially marginalized individuals as being less able to make successful complaints. Thus, they argue that “the use of force is especially likely when the police face citizens who are unable to complain, or mobilize public opinion in their favor” (Birkbeck and Gabaldon 1998, 317). Generalized human rights protests can be seen as activism by the politically engaged and relatively influential potentially on behalf of those who are not. Another potentially important causal mechanism of this effect is criminal justice reform. The participation in generalized human rights protest events shows a level of activism and commitment to broadly defined human rights that may be needed to reform police and judicial institutions, and thus reduce coercive state oppression. It is important to put human rights activism in the context of the standard model of political repression mentioned above, but how would these factors translate to the apolitical abuses of coercive state oppression? Since coercive state oppression seems just as likely to be institutionalized as political repression, current levels should be related to lagged levels of oppression. However, as mentioned above, there is not a strong reason to expect that coercive state coercion responds to regime type or to levels of political violence. This suggests theoretical propositions, summarized in Table 1. Table 1. Proposed relationships Factor Human rights abuses Political repression Coercive state oppression Generalized human rights protests Negative Negative Negative Political violence Positive Positive No relationship Democracy Negative Negative No relationship Lagged abuses Positive Positive Positive Factor Human rights abuses Political repression Coercive state oppression Generalized human rights protests Negative Negative Negative Political violence Positive Positive No relationship Democracy Negative Negative No relationship Lagged abuses Positive Positive Positive Open in new tab Table 1. Proposed relationships Factor Human rights abuses Political repression Coercive state oppression Generalized human rights protests Negative Negative Negative Political violence Positive Positive No relationship Democracy Negative Negative No relationship Lagged abuses Positive Positive Positive Factor Human rights abuses Political repression Coercive state oppression Generalized human rights protests Negative Negative Negative Political violence Positive Positive No relationship Democracy Negative Negative No relationship Lagged abuses Positive Positive Positive Open in new tab These are the primary theoretical propositions analyzed here, but additional variables will be considered. First, as mentioned above, since generalized human rights protests are a very specific species of activism, it is important to consider other aspects of human rights mobilization. Thus, in addition to the number of generalized human rights protests, the analysis will also include the number of human rights organizations, the total number of human rights protests (including generalized and particularistic demands), and the number of nonviolent protests, irrespective of demands. Furthermore, Risse and Sikkink (1999) assert that a combination of domestic mobilization and international pressure is crucial to improvements in human rights, so human rights protests will also be examined in combination with human rights naming and shaming. The analysis below will also consider judicial independence, human rights treaty ratification, and US military aid. Sample and Data In order to provide data with the requisite specificity on protest demands, this analysis employs the data set used in Franklin (2014) covering seven Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.1 The period studied here, 1981–1995, follows egregious periods of human rights abuses in military regimes in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala. These cases, then, fit a scenario in which we might expect human rights protests to be prevalent. Indeed, Argentina is a paradigmatic case of human rights pressure “from above and below” (Brysk 1993, 1994; Keck and Sikkink 1998). However, human rights abuses were not as severe and human rights movements were not as prominent in the other countries in the sample. Venezuela, moreover, was a democracy throughout the period of study. The most important aspect of this data set for the analysis here is the careful collection of contentious political challenges (including protests) with consideration of the demands of challengers. Within these seven countries, data were gathered from a variety of news-wire reports on contentious political challenges, which encompass actions ranging from peaceful demonstrations to acts of political violence. This resulted in a sample of 1,319 contentious political challenges across the seven countries that were described in sufficient detail to code the tactics used, the groups involved, their demands, and the government's responses. The supporting files for this data set also provide information for each contentious challenge, including the demands as recorded in news stories. In this research I aggregate data to the country-year level of analysis to match widely used human rights indicators. This produces a sample of seven countries over fifteen years, or 105 country-years. Indicators Human Rights Abuses This analysis seeks to explain physical integrity rights abuses, which are measured here with the much-utilized political terror scale Gibney et al. (2015). The political terror scale (PTS) considers the degree of torture, extrajudicial killings, political imprisonment, and disappearances and codes them on a single scale from 1 (fewest abuses) to 5 (most). This analysis uses the PTS scores coded from Amnesty International Reports (Amnesty International various years), due to widespread accusations of bias in State Department reports (the other source for PTS scores) for the countries and time period studied here. Mitchell et al. (1986, 22) asserted that the “State Department's report on human rights conditions is clearly a political document designed for the purpose of minimizing the abuses of friends and aggressively pursuing the violations of adversaries.” De Neufville (1986) gave a more positive assessment of the State Department reports but did acknowledge that a subset of reports did suffer from bias. Unfortunately, several of the most criticized reports refer to countries and time periods studied here. The human rights groups Americas Watch, Helsinki Watch, and the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights have published extensive critiques of the State Department's annual human rights reports and their review of the 1982 report cites Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala as having serious distortions or inaccuracies, and their review of 1984 finds severe biases in reports on Chile, Guatemala, and Nicaragua (Americas Watch, Helsinki Watch, and Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights 1983, 1985). As mentioned above, this analysis distinguishes two types of physical integrity rights abuses—political repression, which is politically targeted, and coercive state oppression, which is not. I coded these two types of abuses using the operational definitions of the PTS scale, which created two new indicators that I label PTS_political and PTS_apolitical. I coded the two abuse indicators using Amnesty International Annual Reports, like the original. For each scale I adapted the descriptions for scale levels 1 through 5 provided on the webpage for the PTS. The scale descriptions have some references to political murder or detention for political views, so naturally these were applied only to the PTS_political scale. In coding abuses, I considered abuses targeting activists, rebels, leaders, or journalists to be political. Coercive state oppression includes abuses that affected criminal suspects, nonpolitical prisoners, or other victims who were not targeted for political activism (such as homeless street dwellers). A review of Amnesty International Annual Reports for the 105 country-years analyzed here finds that political abuses were mentioned for 97 of those country-years and apolitical abuses for sixty-two country-years. In the early 1980s, reports on countries with high rates of political repression, such as Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala, do not mention apolitical abuses. However, by the mid-1980s, apolitical abuses were regularly reported across all the countries and the reports show tremendous differences in the scale of such abuses, which will be elaborated below. One indicator of the importance of separating these two aspects of human rights abuses is that these two variables are weakly negatively correlated for this sample (r = −0.07). While this may to some extent reflect underreporting of apolitical abuses in the cases mentioned above from the early 1980s, the full sample over the entire period shows a pattern of declining political abuses and rising apolitical abuses, as displayed in Figure 2, that reflect a weakly negative correlation and that is corroborated by regional experts. Mendez (1999, 19–20) asserted that in Latin America the “[t]argets of state violence are different now: police and military officers no longer direct their actions against a political adversary…The victims…tend to be young persons from a poor district whose victimization hardly merits a newspaper story.” Caldeira (1996) cites a similar trend across the region. Explanatory Variables As mentioned above, the theory emphasizes the effect of generalized human rights protests, but in order to understand the broader effects of social mobilization, three related variables, all compiled from the Franklin dataset on contentious challenges in Latin America, are analyzed. The first aspect of protest to be analyzed is nonviolent protest, regardless of the demands. Nonviolent protests indicate the number of demonstrations, rallies, strikes, hunger strikes, boycotts, occupations, and blockades in a country-year in which participants do not take part in violence. Human rights protests measures the number of protests in a country-year that: (1) protest repressive government actions, including arrests, disappearances, extrajudicial killings, beatings, or torture; (2) demand official action in response to such abuses; or (3) demand protection of or protest abuses of rights of particular groups (e.g., women's rights, indigenous rights). Within protests that meet this definition, generalized human rights protests refer to events in which at least some of the participants are advocating for human rights for individuals who are not members of their group. Generalized human rights protests from this sample include protests in Argentina and Guatemala denouncing a wave of disappearances and demanding a full investigation of responsibility. A count of the number of human rights organizations in a country in a particular year was developed using the Transnational Social Movement Organization Dataset, compiled by Smith and Wiest (2012). They gathered data on international social movement organizations, defined as autonomous, nonprofit groups seeking social change that are included in the Yearbook of International Organizations. This list was further narrowed down to organizations identified in the dataset as focused on human rights. The majority of these groups had headquarters outside of Latin America, so this variable indicates connection to the transnational human rights network more so than actual social mobilization within each country. Political violence, typically found to be an important factor in political repression, is measured here by the incidence of two types of contentious actions, gathered in the Franklin data set. First, rebellion measures the incidence of armed attacks, seizing of hostages, and sabotage. Second, turmoil measures the incidence of protests that are violent and/or destructive of property. As mentioned in the literature, another consistent finding on political repression concerns the persistence of repression. Each regression model analyzed below will include a lagged version of the human rights abuse dependent variable for that model (i.e., at year t-1). Davenport's (2007) third primary finding in regard to repression is that democracy pacifies. Democracy here is measured using the dichotomous democracy variable provided by Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland (2010). While the Polity IV variable is often used for quantitative studies, Vreeland (2008) warns that it partially measures political violence, which would muddle the analysis. The Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland variable has the virtues of transparency and allowing clear delineation of regime change. Furthermore, Hill and Jones (2014) find evidence that various aspects of a country's judicial system are associated with political repression. One of these factors, judicial independence, is added as a control variable. This is measured by the latent judicial independence variable created by Linzer and Staton (2015). This variable uses statistical techniques to measure judicial independence as a latent variable estimated from a variety of preexisting indicators. This variable ranges from 0 to 1. Brysk (1993) and Risse and Sikkink (1999) theorize on the interplay of international human rights pressure and domestic mobilization. This suggests controlling for international human rights pressure and also considering the interaction of this with human rights protests. Human rights pressure is measured with the variable human rights criticism, defined as public statements reported in a wide variety of media sources that cite or condemn human rights abuses in a particular country, used and described in Franklin (2008). This variable measures the number of such public statements in a particular country-year. The interaction of this variable with the protest variable corresponding to each model is also added to consider the “pressure from above and below” theorized by Brysk (1993) and Risse and Sikkink (1999). It is denoted human rights criticism*protest. Another aspect of international human rights pressure is sanctions by states, and to this effect, US military aid is considered. Military aid became a tool in US human rights policy, particularly in regard to Latin America, with the addition in 1974 of section 502B to the Foreign Assistance Act, banning security assistance to countries that engage in consistent and gross violations of human rights (Sikkink 2004). Military aid is measured as US military assistance in US dollars relative to the population of the recipient country. Simmons (2009), finally, focuses on human rights treaty ratification as a factor in human rights compliance, and this factor will be added to the analysis. Human rights treaty ratification is measured with a dummy variable for whether a country had ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) before or during a particular year. This is one of the fundamental human rights treaties that spells out physical integrity rights as well as other political and civil rights. It was opened for ratification in 1966, so it fits the time period of this study, and it was also one of the key treaties analyzed by Simmons. The variables analyzed here are summarized in Table 2. Table 2. Summary statistics of variables in analysis Variable Mean Standard deviation Range PTS 3.35 .90 2–5 PTS_political 3.14 .99 1–5 PTS_apolitical 2.34 1.36 1–5 Generalized human rights protests 1.07 1.72 0–9 Human rights protests 1.86 2.38 0–10 Nonviolent protests 6.23 6.43 0–32 Human rights organizations 484.35 148.24 213–748 Human rights criticism 1.39 1.98 0–9 Rebellion 4.96 11.99 0–67 Turmoil 1.37 2.01 0–13 Democracy .65 .48 0–1 Judicial independence .43 .13 0–1 ICCPR .73 .44 0–1 Military aid .05 .18 0–1.11 Variable Mean Standard deviation Range PTS 3.35 .90 2–5 PTS_political 3.14 .99 1–5 PTS_apolitical 2.34 1.36 1–5 Generalized human rights protests 1.07 1.72 0–9 Human rights protests 1.86 2.38 0–10 Nonviolent protests 6.23 6.43 0–32 Human rights organizations 484.35 148.24 213–748 Human rights criticism 1.39 1.98 0–9 Rebellion 4.96 11.99 0–67 Turmoil 1.37 2.01 0–13 Democracy .65 .48 0–1 Judicial independence .43 .13 0–1 ICCPR .73 .44 0–1 Military aid .05 .18 0–1.11 Open in new tab Table 2. Summary statistics of variables in analysis Variable Mean Standard deviation Range PTS 3.35 .90 2–5 PTS_political 3.14 .99 1–5 PTS_apolitical 2.34 1.36 1–5 Generalized human rights protests 1.07 1.72 0–9 Human rights protests 1.86 2.38 0–10 Nonviolent protests 6.23 6.43 0–32 Human rights organizations 484.35 148.24 213–748 Human rights criticism 1.39 1.98 0–9 Rebellion 4.96 11.99 0–67 Turmoil 1.37 2.01 0–13 Democracy .65 .48 0–1 Judicial independence .43 .13 0–1 ICCPR .73 .44 0–1 Military aid .05 .18 0–1.11 Variable Mean Standard deviation Range PTS 3.35 .90 2–5 PTS_political 3.14 .99 1–5 PTS_apolitical 2.34 1.36 1–5 Generalized human rights protests 1.07 1.72 0–9 Human rights protests 1.86 2.38 0–10 Nonviolent protests 6.23 6.43 0–32 Human rights organizations 484.35 148.24 213–748 Human rights criticism 1.39 1.98 0–9 Rebellion 4.96 11.99 0–67 Turmoil 1.37 2.01 0–13 Democracy .65 .48 0–1 Judicial independence .43 .13 0–1 ICCPR .73 .44 0–1 Military aid .05 .18 0–1.11 Open in new tab Analysis and Results As mentioned above, the analysis focuses on seven Latin American countries over fifteen years, or 105 country-years. Since most of the independent variables are lagged one year, we lose one year for analysis, leaving 98 cases. This sample is smaller than most quantitative studies of human rights that use global samples, but the precise data on human rights protests that are analyzed here are only available for this smaller sample. A smaller sample increases estimates of standard error, thus making it less likely that coefficients will reach standard levels of statistical significance. However, as we will see below, there are variables that do meet these thresholds. The theory calls for distinguishing political repression, measured by PTS_political, from coercive state oppression, measured by PTS_apolitical. Since these dependent variables are custom-coded for this analysis, the results will also be compared to the familiar PTS scale coded from Amnesty International reports, which considers all types of integrity rights abuses, regardless of targets. Since these three dependent variables are ordinal, ordered probit regression is used to estimate relationships. Three models are estimated for each dependent variable, with the models varying according to which protest variable is included—generalized human rights protest, all human rights protest, or nonviolent protest regardless of demand. Standard errors are adjusted for country-level clustering, which produces robust standard errors. There are no signs of problematic levels of multicollinearity.2 Table 3 examines the standard PTS scale, measuring integrity rights abuses reported by Amnesty International regardless of targets. Protests that focus on generalized human rights issues are associated with subsequent declines in abuses. As shown in Model 1, the coefficient for generalized human rights protests is negative and statistically significant. The coefficient for human rights protests (whether focused on general or particularistic aspects of human rights) is negative but falls short of statistical significance in Model 2 of Table 3. There is no evidence that the overall number of nonviolent protests led to a reduction in repression. Table 3. Ordered probit regression results for standard PTS Dependent variable: PTS Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Generalized human rights protestst-1 −0.16* (0.08) Human rights protests t-1 −0.11 (0.07) Nonviolent protestst-1 .00 (0.01) Human rights organizations t-1 −0.00* −0.00* −0.00** (0.00) (0.00) (0.00) Human rights criticism*protest t-1a .04* .02* .00 (0.02) (0.01) (0.01) Human rights criticism t-1 .00 .01 .08 (0.11) (0.09) (0.07) Rebellion t-1 .03* .03** .02* (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) Turmoil t-1 .03 .03 .02 (0.06) (0.06) (0.05) PTS t-1 1.20** 1.21** 1.12** (0.25) (0.23) (0.21) Democracy t-1 −1.03** −1.07** −1.03** (0.39) (0.41) (0.43) Judicial independence t-1 3.89 4.07 4.72* (2.97) (2.91) (2.82) ICCPR t-1 −1.00** −0.89* −0.96* (0.38) (0.41) (0.52) Military aid t-1 1.07* 1.12* 1.07* (0.49) (0.51) (0.63) Pseudo-R2 .39 .39 .38 N 98 Dependent variable: PTS Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Generalized human rights protestst-1 −0.16* (0.08) Human rights protests t-1 −0.11 (0.07) Nonviolent protestst-1 .00 (0.01) Human rights organizations t-1 −0.00* −0.00* −0.00** (0.00) (0.00) (0.00) Human rights criticism*protest t-1a .04* .02* .00 (0.02) (0.01) (0.01) Human rights criticism t-1 .00 .01 .08 (0.11) (0.09) (0.07) Rebellion t-1 .03* .03** .02* (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) Turmoil t-1 .03 .03 .02 (0.06) (0.06) (0.05) PTS t-1 1.20** 1.21** 1.12** (0.25) (0.23) (0.21) Democracy t-1 −1.03** −1.07** −1.03** (0.39) (0.41) (0.43) Judicial independence t-1 3.89 4.07 4.72* (2.97) (2.91) (2.82) ICCPR t-1 −1.00** −0.89* −0.96* (0.38) (0.41) (0.52) Military aid t-1 1.07* 1.12* 1.07* (0.49) (0.51) (0.63) Pseudo-R2 .39 .39 .38 N 98 Notes: The values listed are ordered probit coefficients, with standard errors, adjusted for country-level clustering, in parentheses. * p < 0.05, one-tailed; ** p < 0.01, one-tailed. a Interaction with the protest variable corresponding with that model. Open in new tab Table 3. Ordered probit regression results for standard PTS Dependent variable: PTS Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Generalized human rights protestst-1 −0.16* (0.08) Human rights protests t-1 −0.11 (0.07) Nonviolent protestst-1 .00 (0.01) Human rights organizations t-1 −0.00* −0.00* −0.00** (0.00) (0.00) (0.00) Human rights criticism*protest t-1a .04* .02* .00 (0.02) (0.01) (0.01) Human rights criticism t-1 .00 .01 .08 (0.11) (0.09) (0.07) Rebellion t-1 .03* .03** .02* (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) Turmoil t-1 .03 .03 .02 (0.06) (0.06) (0.05) PTS t-1 1.20** 1.21** 1.12** (0.25) (0.23) (0.21) Democracy t-1 −1.03** −1.07** −1.03** (0.39) (0.41) (0.43) Judicial independence t-1 3.89 4.07 4.72* (2.97) (2.91) (2.82) ICCPR t-1 −1.00** −0.89* −0.96* (0.38) (0.41) (0.52) Military aid t-1 1.07* 1.12* 1.07* (0.49) (0.51) (0.63) Pseudo-R2 .39 .39 .38 N 98 Dependent variable: PTS Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Generalized human rights protestst-1 −0.16* (0.08) Human rights protests t-1 −0.11 (0.07) Nonviolent protestst-1 .00 (0.01) Human rights organizations t-1 −0.00* −0.00* −0.00** (0.00) (0.00) (0.00) Human rights criticism*protest t-1a .04* .02* .00 (0.02) (0.01) (0.01) Human rights criticism t-1 .00 .01 .08 (0.11) (0.09) (0.07) Rebellion t-1 .03* .03** .02* (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) Turmoil t-1 .03 .03 .02 (0.06) (0.06) (0.05) PTS t-1 1.20** 1.21** 1.12** (0.25) (0.23) (0.21) Democracy t-1 −1.03** −1.07** −1.03** (0.39) (0.41) (0.43) Judicial independence t-1 3.89 4.07 4.72* (2.97) (2.91) (2.82) ICCPR t-1 −1.00** −0.89* −0.96* (0.38) (0.41) (0.52) Military aid t-1 1.07* 1.12* 1.07* (0.49) (0.51) (0.63) Pseudo-R2 .39 .39 .38 N 98 Notes: The values listed are ordered probit coefficients, with standard errors, adjusted for country-level clustering, in parentheses. * p < 0.05, one-tailed; ** p < 0.01, one-tailed. a Interaction with the protest variable corresponding with that model. Open in new tab Furthermore, in Table 3 we see evidence that integrity rights violations are more likely when the country had higher levels of abuses and more acts of rebellion in the previous year. Democracy is associated with lower subsequent levels of abuses. These results are consistent with most previous studies of political repression. There is evidence that international factors also played a role in human rights abuses. Human rights abuses tend to be lower when there is a larger number of international human rights organizations based in the country, when the country's government has ratified the ICCPR treaty, and with lower levels of US military aid. Human rights criticism is not significantly related to the human rights abuses, and the interaction of human rights criticism and protest is significantly related to human rights abuses in two of the three models in Table 3, but in the opposite direction of what we would expect, as the combination of human rights protests and human rights criticism is associated with higher human rights abuses. I theorized above that the effects of several explanatory variables differ for political repression versus coercive state oppression. The former is measured by PTS_political in Table 4, and the latter is measured by PTS_apolitical in Table 5. I proposed that generalized human rights protests would reduce both types of abuses, and indeed the results show negative, statistically significant effects on both types of abuses. This is one of the few variables to have relatively consistent effects across both dependent variables. To assess the impact of protests, consider a hypothetical country that is not democratic and in which the prior year's PTS_political score was at the highest level (5). If the country experienced no generalized human rights protests, the results in Table 4 predict that there is a 34.1 percent chance that it would stay at a 5 on political abuses in the subsequent year. With one protest, this probability falls to 29.4 percent, and with nine protests (the observed maximum for this sample) it falls to only a 5.5 percent probability of staying at the PTS_political scale of 5. Applying the same scenario to apolitical abuses, the effects are somewhat weaker, as the probability of staying at a 5 on apolitical abuses is 34.0 percent with no generalized human rights protests, falling to 32.4 percent with one protest, and to 20.4 percent with nine protests. The effect of human resources protests (which includes all human rights protests) is weaker but still negative and statistically significant for political abuses, but the sign reverses to a positive relationship with apolitical abuses. Nonviolent protests do not reduce political abuses, and they are associated with an increase in apolitical abuses. Table 4. Ordered probit regression results for PTS, restricted to political abuses Dependent variable: PTS_political Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Generalized human rights protests t-1 −0.13** (0.05) Human rights protests t-1 −0.10* (0.06) Nonviolent protestst-1 .02 (0.01) Human rights organizations t-1 −0.00 −0.00 −0.00* (0.00) (0.00) (0.00) Human rights criticism*protest t-1a .04* .02 .01 (0.02) (0.01) (0.01) Human rights criticism t-1 .00 −0.00 .08 (0.07) (0.08) (0.08) Rebellion t-1 .02** .02** .01* (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) Turmoil t-1 .01 .01 −0.00 (0.07) (0.06) (0.06) PTS_political t-1 .79** .81** .71** (0.25) (0.25) (0.23) Democracy t-1 −0.85* −0.88* −0.80 (0.49) (0.50) (0.50) Judicial independence t-1 1.01 1.13 1.72* (2.30) (2.26) (2.31) ICCPR t-1 −0.85** −0.76** −0.88** (0.22) (0.25) (0.27) Military aid t-1 1.04 1.08* .95 (0.66) (0.64) (0.60) Pseudo-R2 .32 .31 .31 N 98 Dependent variable: PTS_political Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Generalized human rights protests t-1 −0.13** (0.05) Human rights protests t-1 −0.10* (0.06) Nonviolent protestst-1 .02 (0.01) Human rights organizations t-1 −0.00 −0.00 −0.00* (0.00) (0.00) (0.00) Human rights criticism*protest t-1a .04* .02 .01 (0.02) (0.01) (0.01) Human rights criticism t-1 .00 −0.00 .08 (0.07) (0.08) (0.08) Rebellion t-1 .02** .02** .01* (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) Turmoil t-1 .01 .01 −0.00 (0.07) (0.06) (0.06) PTS_political t-1 .79** .81** .71** (0.25) (0.25) (0.23) Democracy t-1 −0.85* −0.88* −0.80 (0.49) (0.50) (0.50) Judicial independence t-1 1.01 1.13 1.72* (2.30) (2.26) (2.31) ICCPR t-1 −0.85** −0.76** −0.88** (0.22) (0.25) (0.27) Military aid t-1 1.04 1.08* .95 (0.66) (0.64) (0.60) Pseudo-R2 .32 .31 .31 N 98 Notes: The values listed are ordered probit coefficients, with standard errors, adjusted for country-level clustering, in parentheses. * p < 0.05, one-tailed; ** p < 0.01, one-tailed. a Interaction with the protest variable corresponding with that model. Open in new tab Table 4. Ordered probit regression results for PTS, restricted to political abuses Dependent variable: PTS_political Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Generalized human rights protests t-1 −0.13** (0.05) Human rights protests t-1 −0.10* (0.06) Nonviolent protestst-1 .02 (0.01) Human rights organizations t-1 −0.00 −0.00 −0.00* (0.00) (0.00) (0.00) Human rights criticism*protest t-1a .04* .02 .01 (0.02) (0.01) (0.01) Human rights criticism t-1 .00 −0.00 .08 (0.07) (0.08) (0.08) Rebellion t-1 .02** .02** .01* (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) Turmoil t-1 .01 .01 −0.00 (0.07) (0.06) (0.06) PTS_political t-1 .79** .81** .71** (0.25) (0.25) (0.23) Democracy t-1 −0.85* −0.88* −0.80 (0.49) (0.50) (0.50) Judicial independence t-1 1.01 1.13 1.72* (2.30) (2.26) (2.31) ICCPR t-1 −0.85** −0.76** −0.88** (0.22) (0.25) (0.27) Military aid t-1 1.04 1.08* .95 (0.66) (0.64) (0.60) Pseudo-R2 .32 .31 .31 N 98 Dependent variable: PTS_political Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Generalized human rights protests t-1 −0.13** (0.05) Human rights protests t-1 −0.10* (0.06) Nonviolent protestst-1 .02 (0.01) Human rights organizations t-1 −0.00 −0.00 −0.00* (0.00) (0.00) (0.00) Human rights criticism*protest t-1a .04* .02 .01 (0.02) (0.01) (0.01) Human rights criticism t-1 .00 −0.00 .08 (0.07) (0.08) (0.08) Rebellion t-1 .02** .02** .01* (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) Turmoil t-1 .01 .01 −0.00 (0.07) (0.06) (0.06) PTS_political t-1 .79** .81** .71** (0.25) (0.25) (0.23) Democracy t-1 −0.85* −0.88* −0.80 (0.49) (0.50) (0.50) Judicial independence t-1 1.01 1.13 1.72* (2.30) (2.26) (2.31) ICCPR t-1 −0.85** −0.76** −0.88** (0.22) (0.25) (0.27) Military aid t-1 1.04 1.08* .95 (0.66) (0.64) (0.60) Pseudo-R2 .32 .31 .31 N 98 Notes: The values listed are ordered probit coefficients, with standard errors, adjusted for country-level clustering, in parentheses. * p < 0.05, one-tailed; ** p < 0.01, one-tailed. a Interaction with the protest variable corresponding with that model. Open in new tab Table 5 Ordered probit regression results for PTS, restricted to apolitical abuses Dependent variable: PTS_apolitical Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Generalized human rights protests t-1 −0.05* (0.03) Human rights protests t-1 .07* (0.03) Nonviolent protestst-1 .10** (0.03) Human rights organizations t-1 −0.00* −0.00** −0.00** (0.00) (0.00) (0.00) Human rights criticism*protest t-1a −0.12** −0.07* −0.03** (0.04) (0.04) (0.01) Human rights criticism t-1 .04 .11 .22 (0.10) (0.13) (0.16) Rebellion t-1 −0.02 −0.02 −0.03 (0.01) (0.01) (0.02) Turmoil t-1 .11* .08 .02 (0.05) (0.05) (0.06) PTS_apolitical t-1 .95** .99** 1.09** (0.13) (0.13) (0.12) Democracy t-1 .00 .01 .53** (0.29) (0.25) (0.22) Judicial independence t-1 3.50* 4.03** 5.05** (1.52) (1.68) (1.47) ICCPR t-1 −0.34 −0.28 −0.39 (0.25) (0.35) (0.51) Military aid t-1 .36* .43 .40 (0.19) (0.35) (0.46) Pseudo-R2 .41 .40 .44 N 98 Dependent variable: PTS_apolitical Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Generalized human rights protests t-1 −0.05* (0.03) Human rights protests t-1 .07* (0.03) Nonviolent protestst-1 .10** (0.03) Human rights organizations t-1 −0.00* −0.00** −0.00** (0.00) (0.00) (0.00) Human rights criticism*protest t-1a −0.12** −0.07* −0.03** (0.04) (0.04) (0.01) Human rights criticism t-1 .04 .11 .22 (0.10) (0.13) (0.16) Rebellion t-1 −0.02 −0.02 −0.03 (0.01) (0.01) (0.02) Turmoil t-1 .11* .08 .02 (0.05) (0.05) (0.06) PTS_apolitical t-1 .95** .99** 1.09** (0.13) (0.13) (0.12) Democracy t-1 .00 .01 .53** (0.29) (0.25) (0.22) Judicial independence t-1 3.50* 4.03** 5.05** (1.52) (1.68) (1.47) ICCPR t-1 −0.34 −0.28 −0.39 (0.25) (0.35) (0.51) Military aid t-1 .36* .43 .40 (0.19) (0.35) (0.46) Pseudo-R2 .41 .40 .44 N 98 Notes: The values listed are ordered probit coefficients, with standard errors, adjusted for country-level clustering, in parentheses. * p < 0.05, one-tailed; ** p < 0.01, one-tailed. a Interaction with the protest variable corresponding with that model. Open in new tab Table 5 Ordered probit regression results for PTS, restricted to apolitical abuses Dependent variable: PTS_apolitical Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Generalized human rights protests t-1 −0.05* (0.03) Human rights protests t-1 .07* (0.03) Nonviolent protestst-1 .10** (0.03) Human rights organizations t-1 −0.00* −0.00** −0.00** (0.00) (0.00) (0.00) Human rights criticism*protest t-1a −0.12** −0.07* −0.03** (0.04) (0.04) (0.01) Human rights criticism t-1 .04 .11 .22 (0.10) (0.13) (0.16) Rebellion t-1 −0.02 −0.02 −0.03 (0.01) (0.01) (0.02) Turmoil t-1 .11* .08 .02 (0.05) (0.05) (0.06) PTS_apolitical t-1 .95** .99** 1.09** (0.13) (0.13) (0.12) Democracy t-1 .00 .01 .53** (0.29) (0.25) (0.22) Judicial independence t-1 3.50* 4.03** 5.05** (1.52) (1.68) (1.47) ICCPR t-1 −0.34 −0.28 −0.39 (0.25) (0.35) (0.51) Military aid t-1 .36* .43 .40 (0.19) (0.35) (0.46) Pseudo-R2 .41 .40 .44 N 98 Dependent variable: PTS_apolitical Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Generalized human rights protests t-1 −0.05* (0.03) Human rights protests t-1 .07* (0.03) Nonviolent protestst-1 .10** (0.03) Human rights organizations t-1 −0.00* −0.00** −0.00** (0.00) (0.00) (0.00) Human rights criticism*protest t-1a −0.12** −0.07* −0.03** (0.04) (0.04) (0.01) Human rights criticism t-1 .04 .11 .22 (0.10) (0.13) (0.16) Rebellion t-1 −0.02 −0.02 −0.03 (0.01) (0.01) (0.02) Turmoil t-1 .11* .08 .02 (0.05) (0.05) (0.06) PTS_apolitical t-1 .95** .99** 1.09** (0.13) (0.13) (0.12) Democracy t-1 .00 .01 .53** (0.29) (0.25) (0.22) Judicial independence t-1 3.50* 4.03** 5.05** (1.52) (1.68) (1.47) ICCPR t-1 −0.34 −0.28 −0.39 (0.25) (0.35) (0.51) Military aid t-1 .36* .43 .40 (0.19) (0.35) (0.46) Pseudo-R2 .41 .40 .44 N 98 Notes: The values listed are ordered probit coefficients, with standard errors, adjusted for country-level clustering, in parentheses. * p < 0.05, one-tailed; ** p < 0.01, one-tailed. a Interaction with the protest variable corresponding with that model. Open in new tab I also theorized that political repression would be reduced by democracy and increased by political violence, while coercive state oppression would not be affected by either. The results are largely consistent with this expectation. Rebellion is, as expected, significantly associated with higher levels of political abuses but is not related to apolitical abuses. Interestingly, Table 5 shows some indication that higher levels of turmoil (including violent and/or destructive protests) are associated with more severe apolitical abuses. While most of these contentious actions were political in nature, there were times when widespread rioting and looting, such as the Caracazo in Venezuela, were associated with a general breakdown in law and order, which may encourage apolitical police abuses. We also see divergent results for democracy. Democracy tends to reduce political abuses, but it is unrelated to apolitical abuses, as hypothesized. Somewhat related to democracy, the judicial independence variable is not significantly related to political abuses but it is significantly associated with higher levels of apolitical abuses. It is rather odd that greater judicial independence would increase apolitical abuses. This may be coincidental, as judicial independence was increasing in the region the same time period that apolitical abuses were also on the rise. This does show that while judicial independence may be beneficial for horizontal accountability, it does not constrain abuses within the criminal justice system itself. Perhaps strong, independent judiciaries faced with crime waves may accept more extreme measures to contain them. International factors have divergent effects across the two types of abuses. Ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) is significantly associated with lower severity of political abuses, but the results are weaker and are not statistically significant in regard to apolitical abuses. The number of international human rights organizations is only very weakly associated with political abuses but it is associated with significantly lower apolitical abuses. The impact of military aid is positive but is only intermittently statistically significant. There is little indication that human rights criticism, as a separate variable, reduces any measures of human rights abuses. As mentioned by Franklin (2008), human rights criticism focuses on many of the most repressive countries, which may be least likely to change their behavior. Furthermore, earlier research that did find significant impacts of naming and shaming found that its effect was in combination with other factors (Franklin 2008; Murdie and Davis 2011) and/or having a short-term impact (Franklin 2008). The interaction of human rights criticism with each of the protest variables is significantly associated with lower rates of apolitical abuses, though not political abuses. The finding that international human rights organizations and human rights criticism combined with protest are more effective at lowering apolitical abuses may show that political leaders are more willing to act on apolitical abuses when they are brought to their attention since these abuses are less of a threat to their political power. Reverse Causality It is important here to consider the possibility of reverse causality. One scenario of reverse causality would hold if human rights activists only protest when repression is at a low level. Here, lower repression would be the causal factor in higher protest rather than the other way around. However, Franklin (2014) found that human rights contentious challenges tend to occur at higher levels on the PTS. Thus, there is no support for this scenario. A second possible scenario of reverse causality would apply if human rights activists tend to protest when repression is declining. In this case, protests would be a side-effect of an extended decline in repression and not the cause of it. Again, I find no empirical support for this scenario. Analyzing the same sample analyzed above, of the 46 country-years in which generalized human rights protests occurred, 71.7 percent of them occurred where the PTS was unchanged from the previous year, 17.4 percent occurred where PTS declined, and the other 10.9 percent occurred where PTS increased. We can also examine the countries that represent the strongest case for generalized human rights protests leading to declines in repression. In Argentina, the first human rights protest measured here was in March, 1981, when the PTS score was at the worst rating (5), just as it had been the previous few years. In Chile, the first generalized human rights protest measured during the timeframe of this study was in 1984, when the PTS score was at the second-worst level (4). In Guatemala, the first generalized human rights protest was in May, 1982, when the PTS score was at its worst rating, as it had been for several years. Therefore, the available evidence does not support the reverse causality interpretation. Country Patterns and Causal Mechanisms Therefore, there is consistent evidence that human rights protests, and particularly protests that focus on human rights of out-groups, are associated with declines in human rights abuses. This raises the question of why this would be the case. As mentioned in the theory section, one reason is that such generalized human rights protests communicate to police officers that there are activists who will call them out for violence against even socially marginalized individuals, which could lead to official or judicial penalties against them. The data on police attitudes are not available to definitively test this causal mechanism, but we can look more deeply at another causal mechanisms that examines the role of human rights protests in encouraging democratization and criminal justice reform. Brysk (1994), in her study of the human rights movement in Argentina, argued that the movement contributed to democratization, which, in turn, contributed to the decline in human rights abuses. Clearly, democratization should reduce political repression, but evidence provided above shows that it does not seem to lead to a decline in coercive state oppression. While democratization alone does not prevent apolitical abuses by police, it does improve the possibility of reform of the institutions of criminal justice, which a strong human rights movement (as evidenced by generalized human rights protests) can encourage. In order to assess this causal mechanism, a closer examination will be made of Argentina and Chile, which experienced democratization along with plentiful generalized human rights protests, along with Brazil and Venezuela, which experienced democracy but few such protests. Mexico is omitted at this stage because it did not experience democracy during the time period studied here and Guatemala and Nicaragua are omitted because they experienced civil wars during the period under study and were more ambiguous in terms of regime-type. Argentina and Chile had the two largest reductions in human rights abuses among the countries studied here, both dropping from the worst PTS rating of 5 in 1981 to 2 by 1995. Figures 3 and 4 show that the dramatic decline in abuses was limited to political repression. Apolitical abuses increased over time, but the most important comparison for apolitical abuses is cross-national. As shown in Figures 5 and 6, the level of apolitical abuses was unmistakably higher in Brazil and Venezuela. Brazil was at the worst rating for apolitical abuses (5) from 1987 through 1995. Venezuela was rated at 4 on apolitical abuses from 1991 through 1995. In contrast, Argentina and Chile shifted between scores of 2 and 3 on apolitical abuses. Looking beyond the numerical ratings, most of the abuses cited in Amnesty International Annual Reports in Brazil after democratization in 1985 include: widespread torture and mistreatment of criminal suspects in police custody; brutality, neglect, and overcrowding in prisons; and extrajudicial execution of suspected criminals (especially homeless children) by death squads that were typically connected to the police forces. It is clear that the victims of these abuses were not political actors. In Venezuela there were also numerous references to abuses against criminal suspects and horrible prison conditions. Again, most of these actions were not focused on groups that would present a political threat to the regime, but rather on socially marginalized groups, and the perpetrators were part of the criminal justice system. To get a sense of the relative scale of abuses, Amnesty International Annual Report 1993 referred to 773 complaints of unlawful coercion by police in Argentina over a three-year period and the death of one and disappearance of another person in police custody. The report on Chile cites at least 50 cases of torture by security forces, with no mention of deaths. The abuses were more severe in Venezuela, with the same report citing 63 prison inmates killed by authorities in a raid, and dozens killed by police. Brazil was even worse, as Amnesty International reported 111 prison inmates killed by authorities who were quelling a disturbance, 1,264 fatal shootings by military police in Sao Paulo, and the killing of 4,611 youths over a three-year period, of whom 82 percent were black. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Human rights abuses and human rights protests in Argentina Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Human rights abuses and human rights protests in Argentina Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Human rights abuses and human rights protests in Chile Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Human rights abuses and human rights protests in Chile Figure 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Human rights abuses and human rights protests in Brazil Figure 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Human rights abuses and human rights protests in Brazil Figure 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Human rights abuses and human rights protests in Venezuela Figure 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Human rights abuses and human rights protests in Venezuela Along with dramatic declines in political abuses and relatively low apolitical abuses, Argentina and Chile also had the two highest levels of generalized human rights protests for the sample (thirty and twenty, respectively). Argentina's human rights movement is well described in Brysk (1994) and gained international notoriety with the likes of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and SERPAJ, led by 1980 Nobel Peace Prize awardee Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. The Mothers and Esquivel, in particular, were actively involved in protests demanding the truth on what happened to the thousands of disappeared Argentinians and later focusing their demands on justice for those responsible and the restructuring of institutions to prevent future abuses. Of the thirty generalized human rights protests in Argentina found in news reports, human rights groups were involved in twenty-three of them. From the end of 1981 until the end of military rule in 1983, political parties and the leading labor confederation, CGT, also joined in protests making human rights demands. Human rights, then, became a unifying demand for the pro-democratic opposition, and Brysk (1994) argues that the human rights movement became an important factor in democratization. Indeed, as shown in Figure 3, democratization occurred in 1983, just after the generalized human rights protests peaked in 1982. Chile also developed its own sector of human rights groups, as described by Cleary (1997). These organizations gathered and spread information on abuses and provided aid to victims, but they were not as prominently involved in protests as their Argentine counterparts, as only four of the twenty general human rights protests in Chile were organized by human rights groups. However, human rights grievances were prominent in the monthly nationwide protests in 1983, organized first by labor unions and then by coalitions of political parties. The indicator used here identifies 1990 as the year of democratization. As shown in Figure 4, this did not follow on the heels of the peak in human rights protests (1985), but human rights issues, as mentioned above, were a major issue in the opposition to Pinochet, and played a role in the campaign for a “No” vote on the 1988 plebiscite that ended Pinochet's grip on the presidency and cleared the way for democratization (Constable and Valenzuela 1991). Thus, both Argentina and Chile experienced relatively high rates of generalized human rights protests combined with timely democratization. Brazil, while having a large number of human rights organizations, only had three generalized human rights protests, and human rights was not as much of an issue on the agenda of newly democratic Brazil as it was in Argentina and Chile. Venezuela was democratic throughout the period studied but had a relatively low rate of generalized human rights protests (eight). The main issue of protests in Venezuela was growing poverty and economic decline rather than human rights. The greater frequency of generalized human rights protests in Argentina and Chile shows the presence of a movement dedicated to broad principles of human rights and not just to protecting one's own group. These protests became part of broader demands for democratization, and when democratization did occur, human rights was prominent on the political agenda. The victims of coercive state oppression are often not politically influential, but where there is an active human rights movement, these political activists can serve as a check against abuses of these marginalized victims. One important causal mechanism for this is criminal justice reform. For example, Brysk (1994) discussed the Argentine human rights movement's extension in the mid-1980s from political repression under military rule to police abuses. She noted that “the extension of human rights claims to the police went beyond deactivating repression to question the traditional treatment of suspects—especially the poor” (Brysk 1994, 109). Brysk described a number of efforts, including studies of such abuses by a human rights group, the appointment of new leadership of police forces that cracked down on abusive police officers, new regulations and safeguards of arrests, new training standards for police, and a new prison inspection system that included representatives of human rights groups. Fuentes (2004), furthermore, cited a series of reforms to law enforcement in Argentina starting with reform of the judicial process for prosecutions of military personnel in 1984, followed in 1991 with measures restricting police powers to detain individuals and requiring police to read detainees their rights and to warn individuals before using weapons. Fuentes also referred to criminal justice reforms that were developed in Chile in the early 1990s and passed congress in 1998, which made torture a crime and abolished the power of police to arrest individuals merely on acting or appearing “suspicious.” Cleary (1997) added that Chilean human rights groups were tackling the issue of police abuses, filing nineteen lawsuits in 1993 and 1994. For Argentina, Fuentes (2004) cited the role of strong human rights advocacy groups in getting these reforms passed. He argued that advocacy groups were less involved in Chile, as reforms were developed and advocated by experts, including a group tied to the Christian Democratic Party. This is consistent with findings in this research that human rights protests in Chile were carried out more often by political parties and less often by human rights organizations. Fuentes also notes that these reforms in both countries were watered down by powerful pro-order coalitions and failed to reduce police abuses as much as the reformers hoped. However, these imperfect institutional checks on criminal justice in Argentina and Chile go well beyond Brazil and Venezuela during this period of study. Light, Prado, and Wang (2015) noted that in Brazil the 1988 post-democratization constitution preserved subordination of state military police forces (which play a huge role in law enforcement) to the army and that no other major police reform had been implemented since then. Birkbeck (2009) noted that the criminal justice system in Venezuela gave police, courts, and government officials immense powers over the accused. The Vagrancy Law, dating back to 1939, allowed police to arrest people considered social nuisances and petty criminals and imprison them for up to five years, bypassing the criminal courts. Furthermore, Venezuela through the 1980s and most of the 1990s gave great discretion for pre-trial detention for as long as two years. Birkbeck notes that this system remained in place until the courts struck down the Vagrancy Law in 1997, and criminal justice reform was instituted in 1999 following the realigning election of 1998. Therefore, it is argued here that reform of the criminal justice system is an important causal mechanism from human rights protest to actual reductions in human rights abuses. The most important aspect of these reforms is that they extend beyond political repression into coercive state oppression. Conclusion This research examines the impact of human rights movements on human rights abuses. This study is the first of its kind to have a systematic, cross-national measure of human rights protests that can be weighed against other major factors like regime type and political violence. Furthermore, a close examination of human rights protests suggests a distinction between those focused on generalized human rights violations in a country and protests that are mainly concerned with actions against one's own group. The analysis shows that this is an important distinction as generalized human rights protests are consistently associated with subsequent declines in human rights abuses. Furthermore, this paper shows the importance of distinguishing between political repression, which targets political threats to the government, and coercive state oppression, which targets marginalized groups that do not pose such a threat. This analysis develops separate measures of the two types of abuses and finds that several of the key factors in political repression, such as democracy and political violence, have no impact on coercive state oppression. The major exception is generalized human rights protests, which tend to reduce both types of abuses. The cases of Argentina and Chile show that generalized human rights protests have the greatest effect in combination with timely democratization, so that human rights can be put on the agenda of new democracies. One might ask whether democratization is really the underlying cause of human rights improvement, but the results show that democracy and generalized human rights protests both independently reduce political repression. Furthermore, democratization has no impact on coercive state oppression, as shown by the quantitative results and especially the case of Brazil in which apolitical abuses worsened after democratization. These abuses tend to target the powerless, but generalized human rights protests signal to officials in the criminal justice system that they may be held accountable for violence against the marginalized. Addressing oppression is also facilitated by reforming institutions of criminal justice and rooting out biases in practices, which is encouraged by an active human rights sector. These findings call for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between democracy and human rights abuses, similar to Haschke (2017). As discussed above, Davenport (2007) argues that democracy should discourage repression through processes of veto by other power actors and especially through voice, as citizens can register their opposition to repression at the ballot box. However, voice and veto may not protect against coercive state oppression as well because the victims of such abuses tend to belong to socially marginalized groups. Thus, they have less of a voice in politics and often lack representation by powerful veto players. Fuentes (2004) also makes the case that there are powerful coalitions that oppose criminal justice reforms. Reducing these abuses requires more than just democratic institutions. It requires consistent pressure for reform, and an active human rights movement, indicated here by participation in broadly focused human rights protests, is an important source of this pressure. The findings here may help explain the “threshold” effects in which only countries at high levels of democracy indicators experience fewer human rights abuses (Davenport and Armstrong 2004; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005). Countries at these high scores of democracy indicators may have a more active civil society and more accountable criminal justice system than electoral democracies with lower scores that experience more apolitical abuses. This study is based on cases from a particular time period and region. Therefore, we must consider whether the findings are generalizable. Clearly, we would be more confident in generalizability if we could study a broader sample of countries and a longer time period, but data on human rights protests used here are only available for this sample. Despite the focus on one region, this study does include cases with a variety of contexts in terms of regime change, levels of protest, civil war, and human rights trends. Furthermore, it is reassuring that the sample here does show the expected relationships from political repression theory when we examine the standard PTS scale of human rights or the scale of political abuses. As always, this research should be followed up in other regions and time periods. Supplementary Information Supplementary information is available at the International Studies Quarterly data archive. Footnotes 1 These cases were the Latin American cases chosen from a global random sample, stratified by population. 2 The bivariate correlations between explanatory variables are below 0.5 and variance inflation factor scores ranged from 1.38 to 3.29 with a mean of 2.20. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Beth Simmons and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to Joy Gao for her assistance in obtaining a portion of the data. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 3rd biennial Social Practice of Human Rights Conference in Dayton, Ohio. James C. Franklin is Professor and Chair of Politics and Government at Ohio Wesleyan University. His primary fields are comparative politics and international relations, with research and teaching interests in contentious politics, human rights, democratization, and Latin American politics. 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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Human Rights on the March: Repression, Oppression, and Protest in Latin America
JO - International Studies Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/isq/sqz083
DA - 2019-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/human-rights-on-the-march-repression-oppression-and-protest-in-latin-CFF0f0wx0m
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -