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Popular Injustice focuses on the spread of highly punitive forms of social control (known locally as mano dura) in contemporary Latin America, with a particular focus on lynchings in postwar Guatemala.
Central American countries have long defined health as a human right. But in recent years regional trade agreements have ushered in aggressive intellectual property reforms, undermining this conception. Questions of IP and health provisions are pivotal to both human rights advocacy and "free" trade policy, and as this book chronicles, complex political battles have developed across the region. Looking at events in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Guatemala, Angelina Godoy argues that human rights advocates need to approach intellectual property law as more than simply a roster of regulations. IP represents the cutting edge of a global tendency to value all things in market terms: Life forms—from plants to human genetic sequences—are rendered commodities, and substances necessary to sustain life—medicines—are restricted to insure corporate profits. If we argue only over the terms of IP protection without confronting the underlying logic governing our trade agreements, then human rights advocates will lose even when they win.
“[S]heds light not only on the obstacles to making motherhood safer, but to improving the health of poor populations in general.”—Social Anthropology Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study follows the global policies that have been implemented in Sololá, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women. The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical personnel, village women, their famil...
In this deeply researched prequel to his 2006 study Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947, Michael J. Pfeifer analyzes the foundations of lynching in American social history. Scrutinizing the vigilante movements and lynching violence that occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century on the Southern, Midwestern, and far Western frontiers, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching offers new insights into collective violence in the pre-Civil War era. Pfeifer examines the antecedents of American lynching in an early modern Anglo-European folk and legal heritage. He addresses the transformation of ideas and practices of social ordering, law, and col...
The last three decades of the twentieth century brought relentless waves of death squads, political kidnappings, and other traumas to the people of Guatemala. Many people fled the country to escape the violence. Yet, at the same moment, a popular movement for justice brought together unlikely bands of behind-the-scenes heroes, blurring ethnic, geographic, and even class lines. The Quiet Revolutionaries is drawn from interviews conducted by Frank Afflitto in the early 1990s with more than eighty survivors of the state-sanctioned violence. Gathered under frequently life-threatening circumstances, the observations and recollections of these inspiring men and women form a unique perspective on collective efforts to produce change in politics, law, and public consciousness. Examined from a variety of perspectives, from sociological to historical, their stories form a rich ethnography. While it is still too soon to tell whether stable, long-term democracy will prevail in Guatemala, the successes of these fascinating individuals provide a unique understanding of revolutionary resistance.
Addressing one of the most controversial and emotive issues of American history, this book presents a thorough reexamination of the background, dynamics, and decline of American lynching. It argues that collective homicide in the US can only be partly understood through a discussion of the unsettled southern political situation after 1865, but must also be seen in the context of a global conversation about changing cultural meanings of 'race'. A deeper comprehension of the course of mob murder and the dynamics that drove it emerges through comparing the situation in the US with violence that was and still is happening around the world. Drawing on a variety of approaches - historical, anthrop...
Rachel A. May and Andrew K. Milton have assembled an array of scholars from different disciplines to examine transitional governments in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Drawing on specific political conditions and organized around topics such as the media, political parties, and political violence, (Un)Civil Societies broadens the discussion about democratization both thematically and geographically.
El Salvador's civil war, which left at least 75,000 people dead and displaced more than a million, ended in 1992. The accord between the government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) has been lauded as a model post-Cold War peace agreement. But after the conflict stopped, crime rates shot up. The number of murder victims surpassed wartime death tolls. Those who once feared the police and the state became frustrated by their lack of action. Peace was not what Salvadorans had hoped it would be. Citizens began saying to each other, "It's worse than the war." El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy challenges the pronounce...
Publisher Description
This volume returns to one of the major themes of the Global Ecological Integrity Group: the interface between integrity as a scientific concept and a number of important issues in ethics, international law and public health. The main scholars who have worked on these topics over the years return to re-examine these dimensions from the viewpoint of global governance.