1. Love of country is often a very strong emotion, stronger than love of humanity. Waving the flags of the group is often a more overwhelming passion than the abstract love for the human species. Historical proof of this is that the Enlightenment, Marxism and even liberalism had to yield in their aspirations for universal brotherhood to the patriotic spirit of the nationalists. The universal reason, so longed for by Condorcet, the international unity of the working class, which inspired Marx and Engels, and the power of free trade to sow tolerance among peoples, which inspired Adam Smith, have been humanist illusions overwhelmed, among many others, by the daunting force of patriotic sentiment.

Something similar has happened with human rights. Its humanist and transnational vocation, beyond the distinction of groups and social divisions, has been reduced by national dynamics, by political struggles within countries, which absorb almost everything and prevent us from seeing the broader picture, beyond borders, of human suffering.

2. Latin America illustrates what I have just said. Countries are increasingly connected and populations are increasingly interdependent, but struggles for human rights are confined within borders, among other things because the political horizon of all peoples is national, not regional, much less universal. The parochialism of these struggles is compounded by the ineffectiveness of regional institutions. These two things, de facto globalization and weakness of regional law, combine to create a deficit of human rights protection; we have local institutions to solve regional problems. I give some examples: migration is a growing phenomenon, causing terrible suffering to hundreds of thousands of people, but they receive partial and insufficient protection from national authorities; the deterioration of continental fauna and flora will continue its ineluctable course as long as they continue to be attended to by the weak bodies that currently exist at the national level; the protection of the Amazon will be a failure, as it has been until now, as long as it does not receive supranational attention that obliges relevant countries to adopt State policies, above the interests of political parties, with a long-term and effective vocation; drug trafficking is a cancer that spreads throughout the continent: its capacity to corrupt the political class, to inculcate a culture of non-compliance with laws, to drain public resources in an absurd war and to diffuse social and political violence is growing, largely because it is a transnational phenomenon that can only be effectively confronted with global policies alternative to prohibitionism or, at least, with regional policies strengthened in the control of the mafias; finally, but there is much more, the continent’s economy will remain very weak, almost invisible in the global context (and, as a consequence, the protection of social rights) as long as borders are not opened, a market for the free circulation of goods and people is not created, with a common currency and effective regional institutions for economic regulation.  Latin America is known as “The Forgotten Continent” and this lack of presence comes, to a large extent, from having a single nation (the same language, the same past, the same culture) fragmented into many pieces, all of them very weak, but which together could represent an important power that would have visibility and improve the living conditions of its inhabitants.

3. The culture of human rights has been shaped by the struggles of its proponents against the despotic regimes that have prevailed in the continent. When despotism has been right-leaning, these fighters have been inclined to associate with leftist groups and vice versa. But the defense of human rights is a cosmopolitan task, which does not obey any party or ideology (we see this in Venezuela and El Salvador), nor is it limited to unmasking a national army or a tyrant. However, it is a universal enterprise, without specific victims or victimizers. Because these struggles are focused on the national level, they are leaving out a number of afflictions originating in supranational spheres, for which there is no institutionality to offer protection. National human rights campaigns have often been heroic and must continue, but they should be expanded or complemented by global struggles.

The call I make in this text is twofold: on the one hand, to strengthen the cosmopolitan dimension of human rights, to not allow ourselves to be overshadowed or limited by the passions that drive national politics, to broaden our horizons, to include other peoples and to be sensitive to others’ suffering; on the other, to strengthen international institutions and international law, so as to make visible the deficit that currently exists in the regional protection of rights and unleash a movement in favor of their effective protection. Human rights defenders should unite for regional causes. Perhaps a more effective, or at least complementary, way to end populist despotism in the region is to submit these governments to the control of fair and functioning international bodies. This is what I mean when I speak of “cosmopolitan” human rights, a redundancy that seems necessary in this day and age.