The Right to Life and Latin American Penal Systems

Abstract

Deaths at the hands of the state in Latin America, through the penal system, are a serious menace to democracy in the region, and they are the worst attacks on human rights. According to the public portrayal of these deaths, it seems necessary to project a continuous war, sometimes as a political war and sometimes as a war against common delinquency. Human rights organizations are usually worried about the first phenomenon and its deaths, but they do not perceive the enormous importance of the deaths produced by the war against criminality, which is publicized by the police agencies to justify the use of their illegal power. Social contamination with common delinquency - and with marginalization in general - is the tool used to inhibit the public denunciation of these deaths - the number of which is frequently higher than the number of deaths caused in cases of open political violence - and to delegitimate any action along that line, especially through the journalists and social operators of the law-and-order campaigns that create the public war atmosphere.