14 - The Contemporary Criminalization of Activists: Insights from Latin America

Summary

Introduction

The scene quiets when President Pinera comes out to make a speech on television. ‘We are at war with a powerful, relentless enemy that respects nothing and no one’. It's just violent delinquents, violent delinquents – same old, same old. (Domi, 2019: 8)

Domi is describing how political rhetoric operates in stark contrast to scenes of ecstasy, chanting and resistance in protests against high living costs and inequality in Chile in October 2019, when over a million people took to the streets. What follows are more organized and intense brutal police responses, a growing number of deaths, reports of injuries, rape, torture and disappearances. Political rhetoric used to denigrate opponents, insurgents and activists is not a new phenomenon, nor is it unique to Latin American countries. It is part and parcel of a wider contested version of politics in which activists and social movements have been systematically persecuted through diverse state and corporate mechanisms. A growing body of research emerging in Latin America focuses on understanding this phenomenon as it is experienced through the criminalization of activists, social movements and protesters (Buhl and Korol, 2008; Doran, 2017; Alcazar, 2020; Celi et al, 2022). This form of persecution is understood as being embedded in a context of complex legacies of the formation, transition to and expansion of capitalist, patriarchal and racialized social orders (Federici, 2014; Celi et al, 2022). Here, criminalization is a tool used in efforts to accumulate capital, and dilute, control and eliminate dissenting voices that advocate for marginalized and exploited communities standing in the way of capitalist appropriation typically disguised as ‘progress’ and ‘modernization’. Others have examined criminalization as a systemic state response to collective mobilization in the context of retrenching established civil and political rights and as a way of delegitimizing activists, paving the way for gross human rights violations (Doran, 2017). Analysing the growing criminalization of activism is crucial for understanding violent relations and the state of democracy in Latin America.

There is a body of literature about relations between the state and civil society in Latin America that sets the scene for the current political situation. This has sometimes shed light on what these relations mean for democracy, with an emphasis on participatory democratic politics as a symptom of deeper democracy and more civil society involvement (Avritzer, 2002, 2006).