The inversion of the conception of human rights and its use in Latin America

Abstract

In the present article an approximation will be made to the formulation fashioned by the West of the concept of human rights; it is a bourgeois conception that inverts the meaning of human rights, where the priority is private property. To understand and explain this reversal, resource is made to some works by Franz Hinkelammert, one of the premier thinkers on the subject matter. Then it is suggested that this inversion of human rights is closely related to capitalist and neoliberal democracy; it is exposed how in Latin America bourgeois democracies are the appropriate platform for the application of the market economy, whose conception of human rights consists of such inverted vision that, in the name of freedom of enterprise, democracy and of this formulation of rights human rights, denies, reduces, removes, disapproves of and violates human rights. This situation is shown by way of contrast with the achievements had by some leftist governments during the first three decades of the 21st century and it concludes by exposing what Cuba―an economically blocked country―has done for human rights, from a perspective opposite to that of the bourgeois vision of human rights.