Democracy and Human Rights in Latin America. A Philosophical Dialogue through the Work of Abelardo Villegas

It was 1992 when Abelardo Villegas gathered a group of academics to collaborate on a research project meant to study the philosophical foundations of human rights, as an answer to the recent call for UNAM’s General Office of Academic Workers Affairs’ PAPIIT program (Support for Research and Technological Innovation Projects, Spanish initials). The proposal sent was titled “Theories and voices on human rights: their basis in ethical and anthropological philosophy.” It was a very prolific initiative that opened a new path within the university’s research lines, with a distinctly interdisciplinary approach.

In the 100^th anniversary of the GraduateFaculty of Philosophy and Letters (FFyL), I am truly pleased with the opportunity of bringing the work of Abelardo Villegas—an outstanding philosopher, professor, and director of this school—to new generations of academics studying global and Latin America’s political philosophy. This approach is done using the book he published as a result of the aforementioned project: To Plow in the Sea: Democracy in Latin America (1995), where Villegas analysed classical concerns of political philosophy applied to the understanding of democracy and human rights. The results of this analysis are highly relevant today and still valuable in the reflection process of our country’s and region’s political circumstances (I will highlight a few passages from this work.)

Doctor Villegas oversaw research focused on the philosophical foundations of democracy in Latin America. He explored the procedures, attitudes, and exercises that defined political parties in the Mexican and Cuban cases, as well as the influence of the colonial past in the development of the nation-state. He analysed the revolutions and their implications in each countries’ resulting government forms, and addressed a new aspect in his research on Latin America: the relationship between economy and democracy. In his philosophical research he highlighted spatial-temporal coordinates from their historical dimension. Following renown Dr Leopoldo Zea, Villegas argued that abandoning or omitting the colonial past in democracy studies was not the best way to formulate questions about the social-historical meaning that democracy would take on for Latin America. He had in mind José Martí’s call in his article “Our America”: 
The philosophy of democracy developed by Villegas had a profound knowledge of political philosophy. He pointed out that modern ethics interpret freedom as the faculty of an individual to give him or herself the maximum norms of conduct, being the culmination of a tradition in which the autonomous individual becomes the expression of individual freedom, as in Kant’s ethics. Similarly, he stated that the idea of modern individual freedom has a very serious conflict with collectivist conceptions, especially when the individual is asked to obey the decisions of majorities or, in other words, when the individual is asked to submit their own interests to those of society. 

Villegas argued modern democracy has freedom as a general framing because it is one of its specific differences: “I believe that freedom is the genre and democracy is one type of freedom or a very specific differentiation, but not the only possible” (Villegas, 1995). In other studies, Dr Villegas dealt with the relationship between reformism and revolution (Villegas, 1971). Now, freedom had his attention as well as democracy linked by human rights, which allowed him to show both his philosophical and his historical knowledge to distinguish the conceptions of modern and ancient democracy, as well as the democratic tendencies at the end of the 20^th century. At this stage of analysis, he wondered about what should be understood as causes of a historical fact, and as consequences of determinist and fatalist perspectives when they state absolute causes for an event. For this reason, he stated that he chose to talk about conditions of possibility, in this case, for democracy in Latin America. In this regard, he affirmed that democracy is a contingent fact, in its place there may be something else. In other words, it is not a question of the development of an entity whose forms have an end, in anticipation to the Hegelian mode. The title of the book refers to the framing in which Bolivar’s phrase “to plow in the sea” appears representing his pessimism for not having succeeded in bringing the newly independent countries to a civilized condition, which Villegas redirected with a realistic optimism to analyse the Latin American struggle to achieve democratic regimes. 

In his book he also recalled Lincoln’s phrase on democracy as the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, since it allowed him to compare historical-philosophical contexts thus questioning: Who is the people for the Spanish-American enlightened individuals? In its modern meaning, the people is made of individuals empowered to exercise freedom of thought, beliefs, opinions, subjectivity, decision making, and political choices. 

The idea of a sovereign people correlates with a new meaning of equality. Equal individuals are those who participate in public opinion, enlightened individuals expose their ideas, which are “fundamental conditions for the establishment of democracy” (Villegas, 1995, p. 33). The comprehension of the individual in modern political thought needs to be presented: he is the white male, a proprietor, and a Christian, a subject certain qualities or requirements to have rights, concentrated in the bourgeois man. This is the subject who turned the Ancient Regime upside down, the citizen-individual who arose as a protagonist of the new social forms, and the addressee of the Bills of Rights of the American colonies and of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in the 18^th century. 

Those documents enunciate a man from a determined cultural location, with a specific struggle against a state of things, which revolutionise towards a new order with new values for freedom and equality. Marx’s critique of the rights of man in On the Jewish Question, aimed to exhibit that man who claimed to represent all mankind while belonging to a social class. But this way of understanding the rights of man has changed: human rights are historical. It should be noted that for some experts humanity cannot be divided into generations, even though it is a perspective that is consistent with its historicity, as they argue, among other things, it can stablish hierarchy among them. However, accepting that generations exist also allows to differentiate types of conquests that have occurred and their meanings, and to establish interdependence among them. Human rights, whether individual, social, or collective, are conquests of the victims and the excluded; they come from below and had never been gifts from the authorities. 

Back to the context of modern political relations and their implications in Latin America, Ignacio Sosa has pointed out that “Liberty, equality, and fraternity, have, as a reference and as a limit the colonizing party or, as it was commonly called at the time, the civilizing party”, while “justice means the elimination of privileges and the subsequent guarantee that the same law would be applied to all individuals and in the same way” (Sosa, 1994, pp. 40 and 49). In a nation of fraternal, equal, and free citizens, the symbol of justice is blindfolded, since it has no preferences insofar as all individuals are all equal for it. Such idea of justice, jointed to the idea of equality, is very different from those applied in the Ancient Regime, where justice and disagreements were solved by considering the place in the group to which individuals belonged; justice was not blind since it corresponded to proportional equality. Therefore, to be applied, it does contemplate the parts of the social body, since every individual belongs to a part to which certain norms correspond indicating what is right to comply with. In this sense, liberalism: 
Before this political panorama, considering the final moment of the colonial period and the beginnings of liberalism, Villegas again wondered Who is the people? bringing up debates narrated by Lucas Alamán to a reunion called by the viceroy of the New Spain, José de Iturrigaray, to discuss concerns about royal sovereignty after the abdication of Carlos IV and Fernando VII in favour of José Bonaparte. Opinions appeared here, such as the one by Francisco Verdad y Ramos, who affirmed that the royal sovereignty would lie in the people; later oidor (“hearer”, a kind of Attorney General in the vice-royal administration) Guillermo Antonio de Aguirre y Viana explained that the people were the established authorities. “Among those attending the meeting were officials of the City Council, members of the Royal Audience, the Archbishop of Mexico, high-ranking military officers, indigenous caciques (chiefs), and others” (Villegas, 1995, pp. 31-32). The clarification of the oidor Aguirre about who was the people holding the royal sovereignty, was very important for Villegas, since it recalled the words of Fray Melchor de Talamantes when he mentioned the “little people” (gente menuda). Now, the authorities present there represented a corporate society and not a society built by people’s exercise of freedom (in its modern sense), to which only a very specific bourgeoise minority could access. Villegas pointed out that “The concept of equality of the enlightened criollos was not as broad as to accept equality between Hispanics and Indians” (Villegas, 1995, p. 32). It is understood, then, that the individual as seen by liberalism was nothing but a metaphysical idea for these realities (Sosa, 1995). Villegas cited his mentor again: “Leopoldo Zea has clearly pointed out that, therefore, such idea of liberalism was not an expression of a reality but only the aspiration of a group of pre-bourgeois enlightened men” (Villegas, 1995, p. 51). 

The need to elaborate democratic utopias was more than legitimate for Villegas. He argued that these utopias would include the critique of both Simón Rodríguez and José Martí on considering Europeanist positions that ignore the recognition of the peculiarities and the knowledge from deep inside our realities; as well as contemplating mechanisms, strategies, and actions to remove the usurpers of popular sovereignty. Thus, following Maurice Duverger, for whom political parties are means for the change from oligarchic to democratic societies, Villegas pointed out that, during the 19^th century, political parties were not really so, since they failed to form a structure and an ideological platform with internal organization: “Members of the parties did not have a clear idea of the unity of the nation, much less that the nation should be above partisan interests” (Villegas, 1995, p. 40). 

Moving on to a second stage of political parties and their relationship with democracy in the first part of the 20^th century, Villegas observed that some Latin American countries had political parties that claimed to represent the national interests. In the case of Mexico, this phenomenon had as its antecedent the change in the political perspective of the legislators of 1917 compared to the liberal and individual constitutionalism of the 
19^th century: 
The State that emerged from here was not a socialist one, but an entity that acted as a stabilizer, supporting on one side entrepreneurial initiatives, and on the other the growth of bureaucracy. This did not mean supporting a democratic regime, so this remained a pending issue. 

The political purpose was to carry out the agrarian reform under the leadership of strong, powerful, and dominant characters which were part of the process that led to the revolutionary dictatorship, a situation that was accompanied by a social development model focused on reaching the workers and less favoured classes. President Plutarco Elías Calles was the founder of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR, National Revolutionary Party), which later changed its name into Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party) and he saw as a positive measure to establish partisan competition. He saw as convenient that those who did not agree with the government system and its popular bases should be contained in a new party, so he allowed and encouraged the partisan game and its legitimization with enough strength to raise the competition between the two parties, but without the necessary strength to take power away from the government party. Manuel Gómez Morín was the person who accepted Plutarco Elías Calles’ challenge to organize a political party to gather those who did not feel represented by the social ideology of the PNR. Gómez Morín, coming from Calles’ government and former president of the Nak of Mexico, then formed the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN, National Action Party). 

In the 1930s, the processes of companies’ nationalization took place and the Mexican maximato took shape, described by Villegas as a figure that possesses power above the president, protected by a single party that claims to represent the interests of the entire nation. This political situation had extremely important consequences, one of which was a rupture with modern republican and liberal theories in which citizenry represented the people who proclaimed equality, liberty, and fraternity, and distinguished itself from the political authority because of their rights before it, as the authority was defined by its duties towards the citizenry. In contrast, the pretended identity of the State with the interests of the nation stands up, directed first by the maximato and then by presidentialism, a stage characterized by the supremacy of the president in charge. An example of presidentialism was the case of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, who broke with the maximato and expressed the following words that Villegas highlighted in his text: “only the State has a general interest and therefore only the State has a vision of the whole. The intervention of the State must be ever greater, ever more frequent, and must go ever deeper” (Villegas, 1995, p.49). 

Presidentialism and the liberal and republican exercises in Mexico did not form the best alliance for the development of freedom and individual rights in general. Despite this, social rights were promoted in accordance with the social constitutionalism initiated with the 1917 Constitution. Villegas approach to the hypertrophy of the State, which ceased to represent what Cárdenas promoted as national interests, contributed to the shift towards the strengthening of the entrepreneurial class and the bureaucracy in subsequent governments. 

Unfortunately, because of his time of research, Dr Villegas analyses did not reach the year 2000, when finally a different party reached the government. But his reflections on the Chilean case showing the transfer of power by democratic means, are very interesting. Villegas mentioned, among other things, the significance of Salvador Allende’s road to a socialist regime through peaceful ways, preserving the democratic means and ways that took him to power. These reflections are still relevant to think about the need for the coexistence of equally strong parties to strengthen democracy, a situation rarely observed. Likewise, his opinions on the Cuban case are also pertinent. 

I’d like to transfer to the reader the interest or curiosity to delve into the work of this great character, Abelardo Villegas, mentor of many generations of philosophers and someone who strongly promoted the creation of studies on Latin America and the Caribbean at UNAM.

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