Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America

Introduction: Situating Transnational Solidarity within Critical Human Rights Studies of Cold War Latin America

3 Situating Transnational Solidarity within Critical Human Rights Studies of Cold War Latin America Jessica Stites Mor One of the central problems of political life in the twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries has been that of what determines the unity of a political community. When direct actions of political collaboration and solidarity occur between distant, unequal, or often quite different parties to create new notions of political community, these relationships have the potential to challenge existing power structures. Transnational ties often evolve as the result of finding a common cause, such as class struggle or a mutual enemy, and sometimes as the result of a newly formed bond of affection or empathy in the aftermath of crisis or devastation. An earthquake or a famine might have the power to bring together communities around the globe to provide immediate relief for victims of disaster, while high-profile cases of human rights abuse or politically motivated violence might spark support from networks of activists around the globe that hope to utilize the weight of extra-national political resources to influence local outcomes. This kind of solidarity is sometimes described as “projectrelated solidarity,” a matter of special problem, or “target-oriented,” and it has Introduction 4 J e s s i c a S t i t e s M o r been demonstrated to lead to diminishing ties of solidarity, rather than longterm ties.1 In contrast, strategic reciprocities and solidarities that tend to have greater staying power tend to be the result of long-standing constructions of political community, most often those that have been codified into law or legitimized by cultural practice, that agents of change are able to turn or to broaden to include a new circumstance or a previously excluded group. For instance, abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic extended to men of color inclusion in concepts of citizenship and rights of man that had long been considered to apply only to propertied white men. Likewise, solidarity campaigns to provide relief or asylum for refugees of political violence are often premised on notions of protection of civil liberties that are well established within the community providing refuge. Political theorist Enrique Dussel argues in his landmark essay “From Fraternity to Solidarity: Towards a Politics of Liberation” that the essence of the problem of crafting unity and mutual support, parallel to the paradox of the Talmudic account of the good Samaritan, is the question of “who establishes the subject-subject relation as proximity.” In other words, what kind of collective political unity allows for the identification of an otherwise distant or excluded “other” as like subject, and how does the other enter into social consciousness as one to whom responsibilities are owed?2 Often, this relation of proximity is described as a set of universal rights and duties, and defending such rights of the other becomes a central feature of political organizing. The authors whose contributions are included in this work all engage the problem and the promise of the transnational as a means of constructing more useful or alternative political unities to the nation-state. The work as a whole underscores and explores the notion that transnational solidarities and sympathies are derived from common or shared understandings at the local level, that is, within grounded national, regional, or community contexts . The book presents such individual moments of collaboration and encounter as they are intimately tied to meta-narrative contextual frames, such as the Cold War, colonialism, or civil and human rights movements, as the volume asks the central question: How do solidarity movements contribute to the emergence of more democratic, rather than hierarchical, forms of political community? It examines the implications of global frameworks of human rights and rights-based transnational advocacy in promoting equitable and empowering political participation in the Global South. As editor, I hope that the work assembled here helps to establish a theoretical frame for the study of transnational solidarity in Cold War Latin America and to inform I n t r o d u c t i o n 5 the intellectual currents of human rights and citizenship struggles from this perspective. The Cold War is a distinctive and key period of political change in Latin America, given the polarizing influence of the competition between two aggressive and powerful states for spheres of influence in the region. This book reveals the way that multiple sectors in Latin America resisted...