Human Rights and International Law from the Ground Up: Mining, Indigenous Communities, and the Community Consultation Movement in Latin America

Abstract

My dissertation analyzes the role that international human rights treaties play in local struggles over natural resources in Latin America. I examine how the right of indigenous communities to consultation in the event of a proposed project or law that affects them, protected in Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization, influences the politics of battles over three controversial mines in Peru and Guatemala. Based on extensive field research, I argue that the treaty protection of the right to consultation is central to the region-wide political mobilization against unwanted mines, but that its importance has rested not on the use of formal legal institutions like courts, but on the cultural importance of international law and human rights norms. Community activists and their nonprofit allies have been able to use Convention 169 and the right to consultation to their advantage by rhetorically invoking the legitimacy and authority of international human rights law, even though there have been few legal victories in court based on the right. My study complements “compliance” studies of international law and contributes to work on the cultural power of law.