Hum Rights Rev (2014) 15:139158

DOI 10.1007/s12142-013-0283-1

Human Rights Contention in Latin America:

A Comparative Study
James C. Franklin

Published online: 17 August 2013

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract This paper reports original data on contentious challenges, especially

protests, focused on human rights in seven Latin American countries from 1981 to
1995. An analysis reveals that human rights contentious challenges are most prevalent where human rights abuses are worse and authoritarianism is present and in
countries that are more urbanized. However, the incidence of such human rights
contentious challenges is not related to the number of human rights organizations
(HROs) in the country. Results also suggest two different types of human rights
contention. National human rights movements, present in Argentina and Guatemala,
involved HROs and demanded improvements in the national human rights situation.
The other form is ancillary human rights protest, in which human rights challenges
are led by a variety of groups, focus on repression particular to the groups involved
and are either short-lived or part of a more general wave of opposition. This form of
contention was more prevalent in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Keywords Human rights . Social movements . NGOs . Protest

Introduction
Some of the most searing episodes in the global struggle for human rights protection
involve public protests, such as the weekly marches beginning in1977 by Argentinas
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo demanding information on their loved ones who had
disappeared, or the outraged demonstrations by citizens following the murder of
three leftists in Chile in 1985 or the massacre of poor farmers in Guerrero state, Mexico
in 1995. These episodes (and many more) are examples of contentious political
challenges, which are collective actions that take place outside of the countrys
political institutions and express opposition to the government, its policies, or personnel. Contentious action is a fundamental feature of social movements, and human
rights movements have gained increased attention among scholars. Furthermore, some
J. C. Franklin (*)
Department of Politics and Government, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH 43015, USA
e-mail: jcfrankl@owu.edu

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prominent theories, such as those presented by Risse and Sikkink (1999) and Simmons
(2009), look to domestic contentious actions as a crucial factor in reducing abuses.
However, contentious actions focused on human rights have not been studied in a
systematic cross-national way. We know about certain prominent human rights movements, such as Argentina, but we do not have data to compare how the uses of
contentious tactics differ in, say, Brazil, or why.
This paper provides a direct indicator of human rights contentious action in seven
Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua,
and Venezuela, for the period of 19811995, which was a period of intense human
rights contention in some of these countries. Human rights contention varied greatly
across these countries, tending to occur where human rights abuses and authoritarianism are present and in more urbanized countries. The number of human rights
organizations, which has been used to measure the strength of human rights movements, is not positively related to the number of human rights contentious challenges
in a country. I also found important differences in the organizational basis and
demands of human rights contentious challenges. All the countries analyzed here
experienced human rights contentious challenges, but Argentina and Guatemala had
human rights challenges that were mostly led by human rights organizations and focused
on general demands. I call these national human rights movements. In the other
countries studied, most human rights challenges focused on specific demands and were
not led by human rights organizations. I refer to these cases as ancillary human rights
protests. Both can contribute to improving human rights but in different ways.

Human Rights Contentious Action in the Literature

Tarrow considers collective action to be contentious when it is used by people who
lack regular access to representative institutions, who act in the name of new or
unaccepted claims, and who behave in ways that fundamentally challenge others or
authorities (7). He argues, furthermore, that contentious action serves as the basis of
social movements (7). Social movements, then, represent cases in which contentious
actions are used in a sustained manner, with a common purpose and sense of solidarity (Tarrow 2011).
Demands for human rights have in many cases taken the form of contentious
challenges, and some of these have gained national and even international attention.
Such contentious actions, compared to more conventional actions, have the potential
advantages of building solidarity among activists, gaining wider attention to the
activists goals through media attention, and disrupting the routines of opponents
(Tarrow 2011).
Furthermore, human rights abuses often take their worst form under authoritarian
regimes, and in these regimes, institutionalized means of conflict resolution are
typically blocked, leaving contentious actions as one of the few methods available
to citizens. Therefore, there are good theoretical reasons to study contentious actions
with human rights demands.
This study focuses on human rights that are typically violated in the use of political
repression by a government against its supposed opponents. This mostly refers to
physical integrity rights, which normally includes political imprisonment, torture,

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141

extrajudicial executions, and disappearances (Cardenas 2007). Such rights are also
emphasized by prominent human rights organizations such as Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch, and they were the main focus of most human rights efforts
in Latin America during the period studied (Cleary 1997; Sikkink 2004). This study
also includes job dismissals used as governmental reprisals against opposition groups
and another pervasive form of political repression: censorship of news media.
Therefore, human rights contentious challenges, the focus of this study, include
events in which people use contentious tactics to protest these types of human rights
violations, or to demand investigations or justice for these types of violations.
Since contentious action is closely linked with social movements, studying contentious actions focused on human rights is an important way to understand human
rights movements. Stammers (2009) argues that while the importance of social
movements was long underappreciated in the human rights literature, ordinary
peopleworking together in social movementshave always been a key originating
source of human rights (1). He asserts that human rights scholars are becoming
increasingly aware of the importance of human rights movements. Prominent works
on human rights movements include Ball (2000), Bickford (2002), Brysk (1993,
1994), Cleary (1997, 2007), Crystal (1994), Jelin (1994), Loveman (1998), Schirmer
(1989), Tsutsui (2006), Tsutsui and Shin (2008), and Tsutsui and Wotipka (2004).
Along with a growing number of studies focused on human rights movements,
two of the most prominent theories on human rights enforcement posit human rights
movements and the contentious action associated with them as an important factor
in reducing human rights abuses. Risse and Sikkink (1999) developed a spiral
model to explain the transition from a repressive state to one that respects human
rights. The first step is when a state becomes the focus of the human rights
transnational advocacy network. Initially, governments will deny and/or reject such
criticism, but some will eventually bow to international pressure with concessions
that are intended to be merely cosmetic. However, the unintended effect of these
concessions may be to permit an opening for social mobilization within the target
state. Risse and Ropp (1999), in assessing the application of the spiral model to
several cases, concluded that the five cases that successfully transitioned to implementation of human rights and rule consistent behavior shared a lively, widespread, and fully mobilized domestic opposition. A closer look at these five cases
examined in the same volume (Poland, Czechoslovakia, South Africa, Chile, and
the Philippines) shows references in each case to contentious actions, including
demonstrations and strikes, carried out by human rights groups or broader opposition groups that share their goals (Black 1999; Jetschke 1999; Ropp Stephen and
Kathryn 1999; Thomas Daniel 1999).
Another prominent work on improving human rights is Simmons (2009). She
examines the increasingly studied question of whether human rights treaties actually
have any effect on human rights practice. She argues that such treaties are only
meaningful to the extent that they empower individuals, groups, or parts of the state
that favor greater respect for human rights. Indeed, she argues that the ratification of
human rights treaties can encourage social mobilization by increasing resources and
the probability of success for human rights movements. Social mobilization is a rather
broad concept that has been used in different ways by social scientists, but Simmons
refers here to social movement theory, and social movements are fundamentally

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linked to contentious actions (Tarrow 2011). Thus, there are compelling theoretical
reasons to study contentious actions used to further human rights.
As mentioned above, scholars are paying increasing attention to human rights
movements. The literature especially focuses on particular counties with well-known,
active movements, such as Argentina (Brysk 1993, 1994; Jelin 1994; Loveman 1998;
Navarro 1989; Schirmer 1989) and Chile (Bickford 2002; Cleary 1997; Fruhling 1992;
Loveman 1998; Schirmer 1989). These studies are important, but a broader understanding of human rights movements and their actions requires a cross-national perspective
and this, in turn, necessitates a basis of comparison. The most widely available indicator
of domestic human rights movements or pressure is the number of human rights
organizations (HROs) in a country. Counts of HROs have been used to study the
strength of human rights movements (Ball 2000; Tsutsui and Wotipka 2004), the
participation in high risk collective action (Loveman 1998); and the level of domestic
human rights pressure (Cardenas 2007; Murdie and Davis 2011). The use of this
indicator is understandable since it is often the only cross-national indicator available
of domestic human rights movements or pressure, but it is potentially problematic.
First, not all human rights organizations engage in contentious politics to the same
extent. Brysk (1994), in a thorough analysis of Argentinas human rights movement,
compared more direct, contentious actions of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo with
the civil libertarian groups that primarily focused on collecting and reporting evidence and providing legal assistance. Smith, Pagnucco, and Lopez (1998) report from
their survey of transnational human rights organizations that such groups use a wide
variety of activities on behalf of human rights, including monitoring, lobbying,
educating citizens, and mobilizing citizens. Only a minority took part in the direct
mobilizational activities of organizing demonstrations or boycotts. Research, legal
assistance, lobbying, and education are undoubtedly important activities on behalf of
human rights, but these activities do not necessarily indicate a social movement,
which, as mentioned above, is closely linked with contentious challenges. Thus, a
count of the number of human rights organizations will probably not accurately
measure the level of contentious action or the strength of a human rights movement.
Second, not all groups are created equal in terms of size and membership. One
large HRO could mobilize as many activists as several smaller ones. Indeed, a large
number of HROs in a country could signal hyper-factionalism rather than strength.
Third, the use of a count of human rights organizations as an indicator of human
rights movements assumes that the presence of formal organizations is necessary for a
social movement, but many social movement scholars dispute this assumption.
Tarrow (2011) argues that the more successful social movements from the 1960s
and 1970s had relatively loose organizational patterns. Rather than forming new
organizations, movement activists can often use other networks, such as churches
or trade unions, as a basis of organization. Indeed, scholars such as Michels (1962)
and Piven and Cloward (1977) argued that formal organizations weaken a movement
through their conservatism and distaste for disruptive tactics. In particular, Piven and
Cloward found that four poor peoples movements in the United States were most
active and effective before they developed strong, formal organizations, and became
relatively quiescent once national organizations developed. Thus formal human rights
organizations are not necessary for human rights movements. Formal organizations
may be the product of a movement rather than the cause of a movement; thus, they

Human Rights Contention in Latin America: A Comparative Study

143

could be a lagging indicator of contentious action. For that matter, they are not a very
dynamic indicator, as counts of NGOs tend to increase overtime while contention
rises and falls much more dramatically (see Fig. 2 below). Below I will describe and
analyze a more direct measurement of human rights contention that does, indeed,
show a very weak relationship with the number of organized human rights groups.

Measuring Human Rights Contention

In order to truly assess human rights contention, we must develop a more direct
indicator. This indicator is based on an original study of contentious political challenges
in Latin America. Contentious political challenges are defined as collective, unconventional acts taken by inhabitants of a country directed against their government, its
policies or personnel, or making demands that require government action. Collective
actions involve at least two people. Unconventional actions are made outside of normal
political institutions such as elections and legislatures. Demonstrations, armed attacks,
violent protests, occupations of government buildings, labor strikes protesting economic policy, and hunger strikes are all common examples of contentious political challenges. Armed attacks and other acts of organized political violence fit within the
definition of contentious actions but they are not usually part of the social movement
repertoire and are unlikely to be used by human rights groups. Still, such tactics are
considered here so that the range of tactics in human rights challenges can be determined empirically rather than restricting their consideration a priori. Indeed, this study
shows below in Table 3 that human rights contentious challenges nearly always eschew
such organized, violent tactics.
This study focuses on seven randomly selected Latin American countries:
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela for the
period 19811995.1 Random selection avoids the common practice in the contentious politics literature of selecting only high-conflict cases, and it yielded a sample
that provides a number of useful contrasts in terms of regime type, level of development, and population size. Perhaps most importantly, it allows the comparison of
oft-studied human rights movements, such as the ones in Argentina and Chile, with
countries that have not been widely recognized as having a human rights movement.
The 19811995 period for this sample covers a crucial period of human rights
mobilization in Latin America. This period also offers variance in regime types,
including authoritarian regimes, democratic regimes, and regime transitions in all
but Venezuela. This is important, since Simmons (2009) theorizes that human rights
mobilization should be especially productive under partially democratic transitional
regimes, rather than stable autocracies or democracies.
Using the above definition, I collected as much information as possible on all
contentious political challenges that occurred in each country. The data sources were
full text news wire reports from multiple wire services indexed on Lexis Nexis, and
1

Before any data were collected, I used the Stata program to draw a global random sample of countries. I
began the data collection process with the selected Latin American countries, since I am most familiar with
this region. Once the enormity of the data collection task became apparent, I limited the project to the seven
Latin American countries that were selected. While this is a subsample, it is still random since each Latin
American country had an equal probability of being selected.

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the news archives Keesings Record of World Events and Facts on File. This process
resulted in a sample of 1,319 challenges in these seven countries that had sufficient
detail to categorize the type of challenge, the general demands or focus of the
challenge, and the governmental response. Media sources are the standard data source
on contentious events, but as with all such datasets, we cannot measure the true
number of contentious events. However, consistent with Koopmans (1998) argument, this process does sample enough events in a consistent way to permit comparison of trends and differences across the sample.
For each contentious challenge, I coded the demands or grievances that applied.
For public protests, these were usually mentioned in news stories. Guerrillas rarely
issued demands associated with particular attacks or bombings, but these were put
into the category of revolutionary demands. These different types of demands are
not mutually exclusive, since a single contentious challenge could make multiple
demands or express multiple grievances. During the reading of news accounts of
contentious political challenges, I determined that the demands or grievances could
be placed in nine different categories. One of these categories was human rights. As
mentioned above, the human rights demand category here mostly focuses on personal integrity rights, which include the rights to be free from arbitrary imprisonment,
torture, disappearance, and extrajudicial execution. The use of job dismissals and politically motivated censorship were additional human rights violations that were considered
here. The human rights contentious challenges coded here include protests against arrests,
killings, disappearances, censorship, or other acts of political repression; demands for the
release of political prisoners; demands for information on the disappeared; and demands
for justice for those accused of carrying out these actions.

The Incidence of Human Rights Contention in Latin America

The prevalence of the nine demand types for contentious political challenges is
shown in Table 1. Here, we see that human rights was one of the five most common
demand types, though slightly less common than economic policy reform, democracy, and economic benefits. One could argue for including democratic demands, since
article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights essentially establishes the
right to a democratic system. Furthermore, human rights abuses tend to be greater
under authoritarian regimes (Poe and Tate 1994) and human rights challenges in this
sample often occurred in similar times and places as pro-democracy challenges.
Indeed, there were 21 challenges that made both human rights and pro-democratic
demands. However, this analysis will focus only human rights demands, as defined
here, because groups may demand addressing human rights concerns without demanding democratization, and, indeed, such demands may be made under a democracy. Moreover, social scientific studies of human rights routinely separate the term
democracy from human rights, which allows analysis of their empirical relationships
(Poe and Tate 1994; Davenport 2007).
With this more direct indicator of human rights contention, we can compare this
measure with the number of human rights organizations in the same country. As
discussed above, the number of human rights organizations is commonly used as a
proxy for measuring human rights pressure or movements, but there are reasons to be

Human Rights Contention in Latin America: A Comparative Study

145

Table 1 Demands associated with contentious political challenges in seven Latin American countries,
19811995
Demand category

Number of challenges
making this demand

Percentage of total sample

(1,319 challenges)

Revolution

486

36.8

Economic benefits

227

17.2

Pro-democracy

220

16.7

Economic policy reform

196

14.9

Human rights

189

14.3

Education policy reform

50

3.8

Anti-corruption

33

2.5

Social reform

28

2.1

Environmental protection

14

1.1

Challenges may have more than one demand category that applies. Source: data collected by author

skeptical of this practice. Here, I compare the number of human rights contentious
political challenges in each country with the number of human rights organizations. A
dynamic indicator of the number of HROs was developed for this study using
information on all human rights non-governmental organizations with a founding
year specified in the Human Rights Organizations Database, which is available on the
Human Rights Internet website. Information of the founding year of HROs is missing
for some groups, but it allows an estimate of the number of HROs in a country for
each year of this study, which is important for later analysis.2 An initial comparison
across countries of the number of human rights contentious challenges from 1981
1995 and the mean number of HROs across the period is provided in Fig. 1.
The number of human rights contentious challenges is not closely associated with
the number of HROs in the country. Brazil had the fewest human rights contentious
challenges in the sample, despite having the highest mean number of HROs over the
time period. Argentina, in contrast, actually had less than half the average number of
HROs as Brazil but over four times as many contentious challenges focused on
human rights. Human rights organizations undoubtedly provide many important
functions, but counting them does not provide an accurate indicator of human rights
contentious actions or the strength of movements.
Figure 2 displays the mean number of human rights contentious challenges and
HROs per year across the seven countries. This shows that there is also a disconnect
in the trendlines of the two variables, as the mean number of HROs rises across the
time period, while the mean number of human rights challenges peaks in 1983 and
falls steadily afterwards. These data support the suggestion above that the number of
HROs is a lagging indicator of human rights contention.

This dynamic indicator of the number of human rights organizations is highly correlated (r=.86) for this
sample with estimates of the number of human rights organizations in 1989 and 1994 presented by Cleary
(1997).

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J.C. Franklin

Argentina

Guatemala

Nicaragua

Chile

Mexico

Brazil

Venezuela

10

20

30
HR Challenges

40

50

60

Avg. No. of HROs

Fig. 1 Human rights organizations and contentious actions, 19811995

4.5

35

4
30
3.5
25

20
HROs

2.5

15

HR Challenges

1.5
10
1
5
0.5

0
1981

1982 1983 1984 1985

1986 1987 1988 1989

HROs

1990

1991 1992

1993 1994 1995

HR Challenges

Fig. 2 Mean number of human rights challenges and human rights organizations in seven Latin American
countries

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147

Explaining the Incidence of Human Rights Contention

The data reported thus far show that human rights contentious challenges vary widely
across countries and over time. A fundamental task, then, is to explain where and
when human rights challenges arise. Tarrow (2011) presented a model of contentious
politics that emphasizes the role of political opportunities and constraints, networks
and organization, and cultural frames. Cultural frames have to do with justifying
action, often by interpreting grievances in a way that mobilizes people to action. This
raises the issue of grievances, which has been questioned as a factor that can really
explain the rise and fall of contentious action (Jenkins and Perrow 1977; McCarthy
and Zald 1977). The theory that contentious challenges occur where the political
opportunity is most favorable sometimes conflicts with the idea of grievances as a
motivating factor that explains contentious challenges. In this case, for instance, it
certainly seems plausible that human rights contentious challenges will occur where
human rights abuses and authoritarianism have been the most prevalent, giving groups
something to protest about. This is consistent with what Lichbach (1995) calls the
deprived actor research program, which includes relative deprivation theory (Gurr
1970). On the other hand, the notion of political opportunity suggests that countries
that are more democratic and less repressive provide a more favorable environment to
mobilize (McAdam 1996). Thus, we have two hypotheses juxtaposed against two
alternative hypotheses.3
H1: Countries that have more human rights violations will have a higher incidence of human rights contentious challenges.
HA1: Countries that have more human rights violations will have a lower
incidence of human rights contentious challenges.
H2: Countries that are democratic will have a lower incidence of human rights
contentious challenges.
HA2: Countries that are democratic will have a higher incidence of human rights
contentious challenges.
To empirically test these hypotheses, human rights violations are measured by the
political terror scale (PTS) coded from Amnesty International annual reports, which
measures human rights abuses on a 5-point scale, with 1 indicating the least abusive and
5 most abusive (Gibney et al. 2011). The variable analyzed here measures the political
terror scale level for the previous year. The Polity index is often used to measure regime
type, but Vreeland (2008) warns that it is problematic in studies of domestic conflict,
since it partially measures political violence. Therefore, I utilize Cheibub, Gandhi, and
Vreelands (2010) DemocracyDictatorship indicator to measure democracy. This indicator categorizes regimes as democratic if the chief executive and legislature are filled
through contested elections and dictatorships if they are not.
3

Simmons (2009) proposed that human rights mobilization would be greatest in what she calls partially
democratic transitional regimes, as opposed to stable autocracies or stable democracies. This hypothesis
was also tested with a dummy variable that was coded as one from the time an election is announced or
opposition parties are legalized under an authoritarian regime until either authoritarianism is reinstated or
until the first democratically elected government finishes its term in office. This transition variable was
included in the regression analysis discussed below and was found to not be significantly related to the
number of human rights contentious challenges in a country.

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Two other potential opportunities do not face the same conflicting expectations. More
urbanized countries should have greater opportunities for human rights mobilization for
two reasons. First, as shown below, human rights challenges tend to use public protest
tactics, and Booth and Seligson (2009) report survey evidence that city dwellers are
more likely to participate in such actions. Thompson (2004) also noted the overwhelmingly urban nature of pro-democracy protests. Second, countries with a higher degree of
urbanization should have a greater potential for human rights mobilization in particular.
Inglehart (1990) argued that the new social movements that focus on noneconomic
issues, such as human rights, were strongly facilitated by the rise of postmaterialist
attitudes. These attitudes, in turn, tend to increase as societies develop socioeconomically, and urbanization is a fundamental aspect of this development process.
An additional possible opportunity encouraging human rights protests, according
to Simmons (2009), is the ratification of human rights treaties. As mentioned above,
she argues that these can encourage human rights mobilization. The foundational
treaty on basic political and civil rights is the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights (ICCPR), which was approved by the UN General Assembly in 1966.
Within this sample, Chile was the first country to ratify it in 1972 and Guatemala was
the last in 1992.
H3: Countries that are more urbanized will have a higher incidence of human
rights contentious challenges.
H4: Countries that have ratified the ICCPR will have a higher incidence of
human rights contentious challenges.
Urbanization is compiled by the World Bank. ICCPR ratification was simply measured with a dummy variable according to whether the country had ratified the ICCPR
by that year or not. Ratification in the second half of a year is not counted in this variable
until the next year.
While some scholars question the benefits of organization in social movements, as
mentioned above, organization nonetheless plays a central role in many prominent
theories of social movements and contentious actions (McCarthy and Zald 1977;
Tilly 1978). Thus, the number of HROs will be analyzed as part of this model of
human rights contentious challenges. The yearly number of HROs in the country is
measured, as described above, with information on HROs found in the Human Rights
Organizations Database.
H5: Countries with a greater number of HROs will have a higher incidence of
human rights contentious challenges.
One final factor will be considered. The dataset being analyzed measures variables
across seven countries and 15 years. Such time-series cross-section data are prone to
the statistical problems of heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation. A correction for
autocorrelation is to include the lagged dependent variable (i.e., the dependent
variable for year t1) as an independent variable. The expectation is that countries
that had human rights challenges in the past will continue to do so.
H6: Countries that experienced more human rights contentious challenges in the
previous year will have a higher subsequent incidence of human rights contentious challenges.

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Analysis of the Incidence of Human Rights Contention

This analysis uses an original dataset covering seven Latin American countries for the
years 1981 through 1995. Data are aggregated for each of the 105 country-years,
though the sample is reduced to 98 due to missing data on the lagged variable for
human rights challenges. The data present two challenges for statistical analysis.
First, the dependent variables measure counts of various types of contentious challenges. King (1988) has shown that ordinary least squares regression is problematic
for count variables. The Poisson regression model is designed for count-dependent
variables, but it assumes that the probability of any event occurring is constant within
the observed period and independent of previous events during the period (King
1989). This assumption is likely to be violated, since protest often occurs in cycles
(Tarrow 2011). This situation is known as overdispersion, and the negative binomial
regression model was designed for such situations.4
A second statistical challenge is that this is a time-series cross-section, or panel,
dataset, meaning that the variables vary both over time and across countries. This creates
problems of heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation in conventional regression models
(Stimson 1985). To correct for heteroscedasticity, robust standard errors were calculated
to adjust for country-level effects using the cluster option in the Stata 10 statistical
package. To correct for autocorrelation, I included a lagged dependent variable.5
The results, reported in Table 2, support the grievance-based hypotheses H1 and H2
over the opportunity-based alternative hypotheses, as human rights challenges are
statistically significantly more common under authoritarian regimes and following higher
levels of human rights abuses. A one-point increase in the political terror scale increases
the expected number of human rights challenges by over 41 %, and democracies have
about 52 % fewer human rights challenges, controlling for the other factors. Countries
that are more urbanized have significantly more human rights challenges, supporting H3
and the broader theoretical concept of opportunities. For each additional percentage of the
population that is urban, the expected number of human rights challenges increases by
2.5 %. However, the opportunity based H4 is not supported, since ratification of the
ICCPR does not significantly increase the number of human rights challenges in a
country. In contrast to H5, larger numbers of human rights organizations are significantly
associated with lower levels of human rights contention. It is doubtful that the presence of
more HROs actually discourages contention, but this does reinforce the argument that a
count of HROs is a questionable indicator of the strength of human rights movements.
Finally, countries with a greater number of human rights challenges in the past tend to
The negative binomial regression model is similar to Poisson regression, but adds a parameter, , that
measures dispersion. For the model estimated, a likelihood ratio test shows that is significantly greater
than 0, thus indicating that binomial regression is the appropriate method.
5
Another concern in panel data analysis is the heterogeneity across subjects. Stata has fixed-effects and
random-effects version of negative binomial regression models that are designed to account for the
heterogeneity of panel data sets. However, Allison (2009) recommends against the fixed-effects negative
binomial model, and the likelihood-ratio test associated with a random-effects model similar to the one
analyzed in Table 2 indicates that the estimates are not significantly different from the standard negative
binomial regression model. Another method to account for heterogeneity is to include dummy variables for
all but one of the cross-sectional units (i.e., countries), but this complicates interpretation by assigning
much of its systematic variation to dummy atheoretical variables which are collinear with explanatory
variables (Stimson 1985, 922).
4

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J.C. Franklin

have more in the future, supporting H6. In sum, human rights challenges in Latin America
during this time period tended to occur in more urbanized countries under authoritarian
rule where the human rights situation was relatively dire. It is important to consider the
larger range of tactics available to human rights advocates in interpreting this analysis.
While ICCPR ratification does not appear to encourage contentious challenges on behalf
of human rights, it may encourage greater utilization of the legal system as an arena for
human rights advocacy. The same can be said for democracy. Under authoritarian
regimes, contentious tactics may be all that human rights advocates have available, but
under democracy, they may prefer to utilize legal or legislative institutions.

Characteristics of Human Rights Contentious Challenges

We now have evidence of the factors that encourage human rights contentious
challenges to take place, but to more fully understand their impact it is crucial to
examine fundamental characteristics of these challenges. The social movement literature often identifies the nature of social movement organization, the goals of
challengers, and the tactics they use as important factors in explaining the larger
impact of movements or contentious actions (Burstein, Einwohner and Hollander
1995; Gamson 1990; Tarrow 2011). This section will examine these characteristics of
human rights contentious challenges and consider an important issue in the human
rights literaturethe presence of human rights movements.
Organization
It is clear that the presence of human rights organizations in a country does not
automatically lead to human rights contention, but we can get a better sense of the
Table 2 Negative binomial regression results for number of human rights contentious challenges
Variable

Coefficient (SE)

Expected effect (%)

Political terror t1

.30** (.05)

41.3

Democracy

.77** (.19)

51.8

Urbanization

.02** (.01)

2.5

ICCPR ratified

.10

7.6

(.28)
Number of HROs

.01** (.01)

1.1

Number of human rights challenges t1

.12** (.06)

12.9

Constant

1.64

.45

Number of cases

98

Log pseudolikelihood

163.11

Expected effect indicates the percentage change in the expected number of human rights challenges for a
unit increase in x, holding other factors constant
*p<.10 (two-tailed); **p<.05 (two-tailed)

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impact of organization by looking more precisely at the organizational basis of human

rights challenges themselves, which I coded with media sources. Only a quarter of the
human rights challenges in the sample were reported as involving human rights
organizations. Furthermore, the percentage of human rights challenges in a country
that included a HRO (which will be shown below in Fig. 2) is hardly related to the
number of HROs in the country. For example, the vast majority of human rights
challenges in Guatemala and Argentina and were carried out by human rights
organizations, even though they ranked second-lowest and third-lowest, respectively,
in the average number of HROs over the time period. Alternatively, less than 20 % of
the human rights challenges in Brazil and Chile were organized by HROs even
though they had the largest number of HROs.
Granted, media reports may have failed to mention the involvement of human
rights groups in some cases, but there were many human rights challenges that do not
fit into the conventional model of a national human rights movement led by human
rights organizations. First, human rights violations became a common grievance of
anti-regime opposition movements. Here, human rights protests were often carried
out by political parties whose main goal was achieving a more open, democratic
regime. Second, human rights challenges often were carried out by groups protesting
specific, recent violations carried against them. These included a wide variety of
organizations, such as unions, student groups, and political parties, or they were
carried out by citizens of a particular community with no identifiable formal organization at all. Finally, political prisoners themselves sometimes acted together to
demand their release or other benefits.
Demands
This suggests looking more closely at the demands made during human rights
contentious challenges. Among these cases, I coded whether human rights demands
were specific (referring only to specific events or victims and calling for addressing
only those specific grievances) or general (concerning the general human rights
situation in the country and calling for general investigations or remedies). The 189
human rights challenges in this sample were split nearly evenly between the two, with
101 (53 %) making general demands and 88 (47 %) making only specific demands.
Human rights organizations made general human rights demands over 95 % of the
time, while human rights challenges that did not involve HROs made general
demands only 39 % of the time. Therefore, HROs are not necessary for human rights
contention, but they do greatly influence the framing of demands of human rights
contentious challenges.
These differences are apparent at the country-level as shown in Fig. 3. Argentina
and Guatemala belong in a distinct category as the human rights challenges were
mostly carried out by HROs, overwhelmingly focusing on the national level of
human rights abuses and demanding general investigations and justice. As mentioned
above, social movements refer to cases in which contentious action is used in a
sustained way with common purposes and social solidarities (Tarrow 2011). These
cases of Argentina and Guatemala can be called national human rights movements.
The contentious challenges in each of these countries extended for multiple years,
carried out primarily by groups of relatives of the disappeared. Most of the human

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J.C. Franklin

rights contentious challenges in Argentina were carried out by the well-known

Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which began public demonstrations demanding
information on their disappeared loved ones in 1977 (Schirmer 1989). Most
human rights challenges in Guatemala were led by the Mutual Support Group
(Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo or GAM), which formed during the transition to a
more open regime, and became particularly active in contentious challenges in
19841986. The group was made up largely of indigenous wives and mothers
of the disappeared (Jonas 1991; Schirmer 1989). Both groups clearly had a
strong sense of solidarity (Navarro 1989; Schirmer 1989) and their contentious
challenges show common purposes, demanding at first information on the disappeared and then evolving, especially in Argentina, to demands for justice for
those responsible for the disappearances.
On the other hand, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela belong in a separate
category as less than 15 % of the human rights challenges were carried out by HROs
and these challenges tended to focus more on specific human rights grievances and
demands. These cases evidence ancillary human rights protest, which are either
short-lived or are part of broad opposition movements, rather than specialized human
rights movements. In these cases, general demands for human rights are often part of
the oppositions demands for democratization and many human rights challenges are
part of the general cycles of protest movements, focused on specific instances of
repression that were frequently used in response to previous protests. Nicaragua
seems to be unique as the human rights contentious challenges were more general,
while HROs were not involved in any of them. Most of these human rights challenges
were supported by the anti-Sandinista opposition, and it seems to represent ancillary
human rights protest much more than a national human rights movement.

Argentina

Guatemala

Nicaragua

Chile

Mexico

Brazil

Venezuela

10

20

30

40

50

60

percent
seeks general reform

Fig. 3 Characteristics of human rights challenges

includes HRO

70

80

90

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153

Tactics
Another important point of comparison for human rights contention is on the
tactics used. I found in previous research (Franklin 2009) that the types of
contentious tactics used by challengers have a significant impact on the government responses. This finding is also supported in other research (Gamson 1990;
Chenoweth and Stephan 2011; Schock 2005). I assigned each contentious challenge to one of ten tactical forms. Contentious challenges in which challengers
deliberately used violence could be coded as violent attacks (carried out by armed
militants acting covertly) or violent protests, which take place openly in public
places and typically do not use military-style weapons and tactics. Forceful
seizures threaten violence when armed militants seize a building and/or hostages
without causing any reported physical harm to anyone.6 Some actions cause
destruction of property without hurting people, and such destructive actions
include both sabotage, which is carried out covertly by militants, and destructive
protest, in which protesters smash stores, burn cars, etc. Nonviolent protests,
following in part on distinctions suggested by Sharp (1973) can be categorized
into four different forms. Strikes and boycotts impose sanctions on targets through
noncooperation. Nonviolent intervention intervenes in some type of established
pattern or institution. This includes sit-ins, nonviolent occupations of public
buildings, and blockades of roads. In earlier work (Franklin 2013) I considered
hunger strikes to be an example of nonviolent intervention, but they are prominent
enough in human rights challenges that I kept them as a separate category here.
Finally, demonstrations are nonviolent protests that express opposition but do not
impose sanctions directly like the other two forms. In previous research on the
tactical forms in this dataset (Franklin 2013), I determined that these tactics make
up three distinct repertoires: the rebellion repertoire (armed attacks, forceful
seizures, and sabotage), the public protest repertoire (demonstrations, nonviolent
intervention, hunger strikes, destructive protest, and violent protest), and the strike
repertoire (strikes and boycotts, backed up by demonstrations). The distribution of
these forms in human rights challenges is shown in Table 3.
Here we see that tactics from the public protest repertoire predominate for human
rights challenges, making up over 92 %. Nonviolent protest is especially prevalent.
Human rights challengers are not unique in their preference for protest tactics, but
human rights challenges have a disproportionately high usage of hunger strikes, as
60 % of the hunger strikes in the entire sample of contentious challenges make human
rights demands. In previous research (Franklin 2009), I found that hunger strikes
were particularly effective at gaining concessions. About half of these are made by
prison inmates demanding their release, fair trials, or better conditions. For a prison
inmate, a hunger strike is one of the few contentious tactics available, and it often
serves to gain attention and sympathy. Human rights challenges in these countries
avoided the rebellious tactics of armed attacks and sabotage, but there were five
instances of forceful seizures spread across four countries. Three of these involved
prison inmates taking guards hostage to press their demands for better conditions.
Comparing the tactics used in human rights challenges with general demands versus
6

Where forceful seizures injure or kill people, they are considered violent attacks.

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J.C. Franklin

Table 3 Tactical forms in human rights contentious challenges

Tactical form

Number of human rights challenges

Violent attacks

0 (0.0 %)

Violent protest

24 (12.7 %)

Forceful seizures

5 (2.7 %)

Sabotage

0 (0.0 %)

Destructive protests

5 (2.7 %)

Hunger strikes

21 (11.1 %)

Nonviolent intervention

19 (10.1 %)

Strikes and boycotts

9 (6.0 %)

Demonstrations

106 (28.6 %)

Total

189 (100.0 %)

those with more specific demands, the only substantial difference was the greater use
of demonstrations in human rights challenges with general demands.

Government Responses to Human Rights Challenges

A final aspect of human rights contention that can be examined here is government
responses. Gauging the success of a social movement is complicated, as social
movement activists often have multiple, changing, and sometimes only vague goals.
Furthermore, public policy is a complex, multidimensional concept and is the outcome of so many different factors that it is difficult to isolate the impact of a social
movement (Tarrow 2011). Brysk (1994) argues that the human rights movement in
Argentina was a crucial factor in achieving an official investigation into human rights
abuses under military rule and trials of those responsible. She notes a number of other
state reforms achieved by the human rights movement, but she concludes that it
achieved less human rights reform, yet more democratization, than it had intended.
Cleary (1997), examining human rights movements in a number of Latin American
countries, notes a variety of impacts of these movements ranging from documenting
abuses, facilitating the work of human rights commissions, putting human rights on
the national political agenda, helping individual victims, and reforming laws.
Here, by focusing on particular human rights contentious challenges, we can
observe government responses and compare those with other types of challenges.
For each contentious challenge, I coded governmental responses, including repression and concessions. By concessions here I mean changes made by the government,
including changes in policy, granting of benefits, or removal of governmental personnel, that followed a particular contentious challenge and were consistent with the
challengers demands.7 Human rights contentious challenges resulted in concessions
7

This includes government actions made up to 2 months following a particular challenge as well as
concessions made to head off a planned challenge that occurred anyway. Actions that happened longer than
2 months after the challenge would be considered a concession if news reports tie it explicitly to that
challenge.

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155

Table 4 Frequency of concessions made to human rights challenges

Type of concession

Number of HR challenges with this

concession (% of HR challenges)

Political prisoners released or given other concessions

16 (8.5 %)

Officials arrested for human rights abuses

6 (3.2 %)

Political liberalization/reforms to reduce repression

5 (2.7 %)

Holding human rights trials or official investigations

5 (2.7 %)

Other

4 (2.1 %)

All

36 (19.0 %)

around 20 % of the time, which ranks below challenges seeking economic benefits
(34.4 %) but substantially better than the record for challenges demanding democratization (10.5 %), economic policy reform (13.8 %), or revolution (<1 %). We can
also examine the types of concessions made in response to human rights challenges.
This is shown in Table 4, where we see that the most frequent type of human rights
concession was release or improving conditions for political prisoners. Other fairly
common concessions involved removing officials (often police officers) implicated in
abuses, making liberalizing reforms (such as legalizing opposition groups), and
taking measures to achieve truth and justice through official investigations and trials.
Given the specific nature of many of these concessions, it is not surprising that human
rights contentious challenges focusing on specific demands were over twice as likely
to win concessions than those with general demands.8 While scholars and human
rights activists often focus on general conditions and reforms to assess human rights
progress, these data remind us that human rights contentious action can have impacts
that are more limited in scope but are real improvements nonetheless.

Conclusions
Scholars are increasingly examining human rights movements, which are one manifestation of the broader range of contentious challenges made on behalf of human
rights. A few focused studies have shed light on human rights movements in a few
countries. It is important to gain a broader perspective on human right contention
across countries, including cases without high profile movements. Some studies
attempt to do this by examining the number of human rights organizations (HROs)
within a country. I argue that this is a questionable practice and I report original data
on the presence of contentious challenges, especially protests, that focus on human
rights. I collected data on such challenges as part of a broader study of contentious
politics in seven Latin American countries from 1981 to 1995.

For specific human rights demands, 27.3 % of the challenges won concessions, and for general demands,
11.9 % won concessions.

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One important question is where and when human rights contentious challenges
occur. A systematic analysis presented here indicates that human rights contentious
challenges are most prevalent where human rights abuses are worse and authoritarianism is present and in countries that are more urbanized. While the number of
HROs in a country has been used as an indicator of human rights movements, the
analysis shows that, controlling for other factors, human rights contention was greater
where there were fewer HROs.
This is not to say that HROs are unimportant, since they utilize other tactics
besides contentious actions. Furthermore, within the field of contentious action,
HROs affect the framing of demands. Only a minority of human rights contentious
challenges were carried out by HROs, but when human rights organizations are
involved, the challenges tend to focus on the general human rights conditions in
the country, and they tend to seek general remedies such as official investigations and
justice for broad classes of abuses. Human rights contentious challenges in both
Argentina and Guatemala mostly involved HROs and made such general demands. I
describe these cases as national human rights movements. The other countries in the
sample (Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) experienced human rights
challenges that focused more on specific grievances and demands (such as members
of a political party protesting the arrest of their leaders) and only a small percentage
involved HROs. I refer to these as cases of ancillary human rights protest, in which
human rights challenges are either relatively short-lived or are part of a more general
wave of opposition. While national human rights movements should be more likely to
lead to general reforms and responses to human rights abuses, the analysis of
concessions shows that ancillary human rights protests are more likely to lead to
concessions, including the release of particular political prisoners or the arrest of
specific (usually local) officials for their involvement in abuses. These may not be the
fundamental changes that human rights activists ultimately seek, but they are often
real improvements nonetheless. Furthermore, as part of broader opposition movements, ancillary human rights protests can help to achieve democratization, which
can lead to profound improvements in human rights.
Acknowledgment I would like to thank Haley Beffel and Kim Eckart for their research assistance and
Whitney Franklin for her editorial assistance.

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