Human rights and popular mobilisation have long been key features of the social and political landscape of Latin America. The region was born of conquest by the Spanish and Portuguese, its very name is a French import, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas have lived through centuries of subordination. In the twentieth century, various subordinate and marginalised groups have struggled for recognition through violent and non-violent means, and have often been co-opted into political movements that have gained control over the reins of power through populist mobilisation and corporatist authoritarianism. Initial periods of democratisation in those countries that constructed nascent democratic institutions and limited forms of suffrage often had a popular element in which the ‘agents of articulation of subordinate classes’ played a major role.

The shift toward authoritarianism throughout the region between the 1960s and 1990s ushered in brutal regimes whose quest to ‘reorganise’ and ‘reconstruct’ societies to make them putatively ready for democracy brought with it patterns of gross violations of human rights. This period of authoritarianism was coupled with civil war, revolution and counter-insurgency activities in other countries, which led to large-scale patterns of political killings and disappearances, most notably in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru and Colombia. The ‘third wave’ of democratisation brought back reasonably functioning democratic institutions and the ability, by and large, for the peaceful alternation of political power in the region, but there remain persistent problems with the protection of civil and political rights, while for a large segment of the Latin American population, the failure to solve the social question has meant that the progressive realisation of economic and social rights has yet to be fulfilled.

Against this backdrop of oppression, subordination, violence, poverty and social exclusion, Cleary's Mobilizing for Human Rights in Latin America offers a picture of hope, triumph and resilience of the human spirit. The book maps the general trends in human rights in the region across a wide cross-section of particular groups, including women, children, indigenous people and the landless, as well as across the particularly problematic areas of police violence, torture and corruption. The opening chapter presents an overview of a Latin American human rights tradition and shows that ideas, actors and activities from the region contributed to the construction of the international human rights regime with the founding of the United Nations and the subsequent promulgation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. In mirroring other moments of syncretism for which the region is famous, Cleary argues that a distinctive Latin American human rights tradition comes from a melding of ideas from Spanish scholasticism and Indian civilisation, a regional interpretation of Enlightenment ideas, and constitutional forms from Europe (particularly France) and the United States. These ideas became increasingly popular and found expression in a series of human rights initiatives in the twentieth century not only regulated in the international arena but also to the development of the Inter-American system for human rights, which next to the European system, is the second most powerful human rights regime in the world.

Cleary's argument is crucial if we are to understand the region as more than the object of the attention of human rights advocates, and a fully constituted subject that has pursued and continued to pursue the human rights ideal in the face of a relatively brutal legacy of oppression, violence, subordination and authoritarianism. Indeed, his chapters on the various groups listed above shows that the language of human rights provided a strong discourse and unifying ‘schema’ for mobilising previously silent majorities to provoke governments and their cumbersome state apparatuses to address their legal obligations to respect, protect, and fulfil all categories of human rights. Each chapter on the groups provides a brief history of the group and the ways in which it mobilised for human rights and the ways that a more general human rights argument provided ample means to address specific issues. Often in the face of significant opposition and multiple forms of deprivation and burden, groups have been able to overcome their problems of collective action and demand attention from the state.

Human rights discourse and its mobilising potential is proving to be equally effective in raising national and international awareness about problems surrounding torture, police violence and corruption. Even though Latin America (with the exception of Cuba) is now part of the ‘democratic universe’, the return to democracy did not necessarily bring with it the full protection of human rights. The region has seen an increase, not a decrease in interpersonal and police violence, the use of torture to gain criminal confessions, and corruption and rent seeking behaviour within state agencies that has compromised the ability of state institutions to provide real protection of human rights.

A popular refrain in the academic literature is to label such a state of affairs as ‘illiberal democracy’ or ‘dysfunctional democracy’, but such a descriptive use of ‘democracy with adjectives’ fails to provide a solution to the many problems identified in Cleary's book. A key lesson that he provides in considering mobilising for human rights is that ordinary people with serious grievances have advanced their claims in human rights terms and have sought redress from the state. It may be that it is state institutions and not necessarily democracy that need to be reformed, enhanced and given substantial new capacity to be able to begin to address the many problems that Cleary identifies. The book is a refreshing and engaging look at how millions of people across the region are recognising their common humanity and articulating a set of demands in the language of rights, a language that is not necessarily European, foreign or ethnocentric, but one that has deep roots in the history and tradition of the Latin American region itself.