IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/oxdevs/v39y2011i2p205-228.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Confronting Racism from within the Guatemalan State: The Challenges Faced by the Defender of Indigenous Rights of Guatemala's Human Rights Ombudsman's Office

Author

Listed:
  • Roddy Brett

Abstract

This paper analyzes the development of legal mechanisms and micro-level institutional reforms aimed at consolidating the rights of indigenous peoples in post-conflict Guatemala. The research is based on prolonged fieldwork carried out with the Office of the Defender of Indigenous Peoples' Rights of the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman's Office (PDH), established in 1998. The paper argues that the establishment of state institutions and institutional reforms oriented towards the protection of indigenous peoples' rights since the end of hostilities in Guatemala's internal armed conflict in 1996 represent important advances, although they occurred within a broader context in which the peace process failed to tackle structural inequalities effectively or enduringly. On the surface, the PDH and related reforms appear to provide indigenous people with unprecedented access to forms of legal redress for human rights violations, including both individual and collective rights. However, given the structural, interpersonal and institutional racism that plagues Guatemalan state and society, such measures remain little more than symbolic, as inadequate funding, racist attitudes within PDH mid- to high-level functionaries, and a lack of institutional will to train functionaries to understand, identify and process systematic violations of indigenous peoples' rights sufficiently impede the effective addressing of profound structural inequalities. The norms and behavior within state institutions and the attitudes of state functionaries operating from within Guatemala's post-conflict multicultural state are today, then, shaped by more subtle forms of exclusion and marginalization of indigenous populations, leading us to question the impact of institutional change on transformations in the political culture.

Suggested Citation

  • Roddy Brett, 2011. "Confronting Racism from within the Guatemalan State: The Challenges Faced by the Defender of Indigenous Rights of Guatemala's Human Rights Ombudsman's Office," Oxford Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 39(2), pages 205-228.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:oxdevs:v:39:y:2011:i:2:p:205-228
    DOI: 10.1080/13600818.2011.568612
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600818.2011.568612
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13600818.2011.568612?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lars Waldorf, 2017. "Legal empowerment and horizontal inequalities after conflict," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2017-50, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    2. Lars Waldorf, 2017. "Legal empowerment and horizontal inequalities after conflict," WIDER Working Paper Series 050, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:oxdevs:v:39:y:2011:i:2:p:205-228. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CODS20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.