Latinos Said to Bear Weight of Deportation Program

A new report (done by UCLA Berkeley's Law School and Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York) analyzing Obama's Secure Communities initiative has found that Latinos are disproportionately bearing the weight of this deportation program.  Although the program claims that deportation of criminal convicts is its priority, many immigrants who were not dangerous offenders have been deported.  In fact, American citizens from Latin America have even been held by immigration officials.

“'If Secure Communities was working properly,' the report said, a match under the program 'should never result in the apprehension' of a citizen."

"The report found that 93 percent of immigrants arrested under Secure Communities were Latinos, although Latino immigrants are about three-quarters of the illegal immigrants in the United States. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/us/latinos-said-to-bear-weight-of-deportation-program.html?_r=1&ref=world

Wrongs in Latin America

It was fascinating to read two writings this week that were more specific and anecdotal than the previous readings on theory.  I found Galeano’s work to be a fascinating way to review historical selections from Latin and North America.  However, I found that Bartolome’s work was more directly recognizable as is related to Human Rights. 

                 

As I first started reading Bartolome’s work I kept a futile hope that I would not read anything worse about Human Rights abuses as I had in the first few pages.  However, as I continued reading, the brutality and evil of the acts against the native people of the Caribbean and Central America shocked me more with every sentence.  Although I had learned previously about how the Spanish conquistadores decimated the Amerindians, the “outrageous acts of violence and bloody tyranny” still surprised and mortified me.  From killing women and children to demanding slaves from the native noble, all of these insidious acts seemed to be done with the “moral excuse” of spreading Christianity.  Therefore, I found it ironic that the Spanish conquerors used Christianity as a reason to attack in the same way human rights as an ideology can be used to invade present-day countries.

Similarly, I admired Bartolome’s reflection and declaration that the only rights these crusaders earned were to eternal damnation and that the methods the conquistadores used to conquer the Americas in fact invalidated claims of Spanish crown to the new world.  Bartolome argues and points out that the new world conquerors were blind to the first principles of law and government.  He says that anybody who is not a subject of a civil power in the first place cannot be deemed in law to be in rebellion with said power.  Overall, although I was shocked by Bartolome’s descriptions, he includes solid reason and arguments against the common, absurd rationalities of the conquerors.

Mexico's Right to Food

"On April 29, 2011 the Chamber of Deputies approved the constitutional reform that establishes the right to food in Mexico. On August 17, the Senate received reports that the required majority of the states in the country had approved the reform and ordered its publication in the official federal record."

This article reviews Mexico's recognition of the Right to Food and its current state of disintegrating food sovereignty and alarmingly high rates of malnutrition.

http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5432

End of Rights:

Until completing this week’s readings, I had vaguely considered but never actually questioned the recency of human rights.  As Moyn points out, the concept of rights stretches back centuries as we have been learning through the past few weeks’ readings.  However, it was not until the 1940s that the term human rights was introduced.  Further, human rights as we know them did not gain popularity really until the 1990s. 

In fact, since the momentum of human rights and human rights declarations has been rapid, I do see validity in Matua’s declaration that “the seduction of human rights discourse has been so great that it has delayed a critique of rights.”  It seems to be difficult to agree upon and define human rights globally.  Different cultural emphasis and philosophical bases stand in the way.  However, Matua draws attention to the fact that human rights declarations follow a democratic liberalism paradigm.  Moyn aslso states how human rights became associated with pro capitalism and anti socialism during the Cold War.  If human rights are actually based on Western democracy, then of course this is problematic to the international community. 

Human rights would then in fact not be inclusive to all nation states and cultures.  I think this is part of the reason Agamben and Deleuze argue against human rights.  Deleuze states there are no human rights but instead life rights.  This would mean that life rights are based on a more individual case by case not on a global one-size-fits-all.  Agamben seems to further complement this argument by suggesting that if human rights are defined only to citizens in globally recognized nation states, refugees without citizenship would be without rights.  Therefore, they suggest that a case-by-case sort of life right exists without the cumbersome associations and exclusions of human rights.