Human rights as culprit, human rights as victim: rights and security in the state of exception

Abstract

In some respects, the recent and unprecedented election to the Bolivian presidency of Evo Morales (widely hailed as the first indigenous person to be elected president of a Latin American nation) can be attributed to his command of the transnational discourse of human rights. In the last several years Bolivia has seen the emergence of powerful social movements demanding greater political inclusion and representation for indigenous peoples, and against the privatization and/or expropriation of natural resources (particularly water and gas), all expressed, in various ways, using the transnational language of human rights. As leader of the Bolivian coca-growers' union and head of the Movimento al Socialismo MAS party (Movement Towards Socialism party), Morales articulated the protest against state and transnational programs of neoliberal political economy as struggles for human and citizens' rights in a context of centuries of indigenous exclusion and exploitation by foreign powers (Goodale, chapter 3 in this volume). Violent state repression of civil protest was critiqued in the same idiom. Like other indigenous activists around the hemisphere, Morales and other leaders and participants in Bolivian social movements have deployed the language of human rights (elaborating their own takes on “indigenous” and “cultural” rights in the process; see Albro 2005) to reframe their struggles for political recognition, social inclusion, and access to land and other natural resources in terms of democratic citizenship, and the right to participate in shaping the future of the Bolivian nation.