Page 110 - Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice

Access to Justice in Latin America: A Changing Legal Landscape
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Joan vermeulen1
Many of the countries of Latin America emerged into the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s from authoritarian governments or civil wars that had substantially curtailed fundamental human rights, due process and rule of law . Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil and Bolivia had military governments that undertook the extrajudicial suppression of political opinion through disappearances, imprisonment, torture and murder . El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Peru went through bloody civil wars that resulted in numerous massacres, sexual violence, land seizures, and forced displacement . Colombia experienced what would become more than fifty years of civil war between various governments, right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerillas that is only now coming to a conclusion .
Throughout the period of the dictatorships and the civil wars, lawyers sought to respond to the abuses of government, seeking to free the imprisoned; locate those who had disappeared; protect those in rural areas who were being killed and forced from their lands; and support civil society organizations with similar objectives . Initially these lawyers came from the same political groupings as those under assault . Their undertakings grew out of their politics and not a belief in the ethical obligation of the legal profession to protect fundamental human rights and due process . In most cases, bar associations in these countries did not challenge the actions of government .
Today, Latin America has a strong tradition of human rights that grew out of this work . With financial support from outside the region organizations such as Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) in Argentina, Comisión Colombiana de Juristas and Dejusticia in Colombia, Conectas in Brazil, and Fundar in Mexico are global leaders in addressing human rights violations and have made the transition from challenging state-sponsored violations of human rights to addressing other broad issues of human rights, including socioeconomic, environmental and gender rights .
The end of military rule and civil wars opened up the societal space to look at the conditions in the legal structures that had allowed human rights violations to flourish . Martin Bohmer, a leader in the movement to reform legal education in Latin America has described the post military rule period in the Southern Cone as going through three stages . In the first, society had to come to terms with the past through the trials of human rights violators and truth commissions . The second stage was marked by the realization that human rights violations were linked to institutional failures and required constitutional and judicial measures to prevent future recurrences . Throughout Latin America new constitutions were written that sought to institutionalize measures to guarantee fundamental rights and rule of law . The final stage was marked by the recognition that constitutions, laws and international treaties with strong guarantees of social and human rights were not sufficient without enforcement . The idea of enforcement, which Bohmer says does not easily translate into Spanish2, is critical because Latin America has historically had an uneven rule
1 Founding Director, Vance Center for International Justice.
2 There is no single word in Spanish for “enforcement.” Several phrases get at the idea but lack the clarity and strength of the English word. Another word for which there is no single Spanish word is “accountability.”
Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice