ABOUT
The Interest Group on Lawfare, Human Rights and Economic Democracy in Latin America grew out of a research group created in 2021 to analyze the causes, modalities and impacts of the misuse of the jurisdictional function to persecute political enemies, violating human rights and weakening democratic regimes in the region.
The term lawfare, coined by US Air Force Colonel Charles J. Dunlap Jr. in 2001, was originally used to describe the use of law as a weapon of war. In Latin America, the term is used to designate the recurring practice of persecuting political enemies by (mis)using the law and the public jurisdictional structure, as in the controversial cases of former presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia, Lula da Silva of Brazil, Alan García of Peru and Cristina Kirchner of Argentina. This is a phenomenon that had already been described by Franz Neumann, in his Behemoth, as the “most pernicious weapon in the political struggle,” given the severity of the resulting damages, and which has even triggered the mobilization of international actors such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
