Human rights and extension

Abstract

We could travel a long road through the history of our continent to find the origin of the struggle for human rights. However, we decided to find in the events that delimit the recent Argentine history, the moment of rupture with previous times, regarding the issue of human rights, and the relationship with the duty of the States, the social, economic, political and media responsibilities in safeguarding them. Our recent history is marked by the traces of genocide, economic plundering and the destruction of social ties that the coups d'état and the civil-military dictatorships of 1955, 1966 and 1976 tried to impose.

The struggle of the human rights movement, its trajectory of achievements, setbacks and disputes, demonstrates that rights are not conquered once and forever, that there is no univocal way of naming, categorizing and establishing what is named when we speak of human rights if we do not take into account the genesis and transformation of this idea in a given time and social space. Human rights -as we understand them- are conditioned by the societies in which processes of recognition and violation of rights are developed, as well as spaces of resistance and remnants of humanity in the face of cruelty. In this sense, human rights must be thought of in a present key, in relation to a given conjuncture, otherwise what exists are only complex words without social support.