ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the issues of the protection of human rights with special reference to the Iberian and Latin American context and raises the troubling questions of whether democracy and human rights are everywhere the same and universal. The military is often the strongest “party,” a fact recognized by both civilians and military men, with the result that most political conflicts take the form, not of a civilian versus military struggle, but of competing factions that overlap and crosscut the civilian and military spheres. The difficulty is that terms like “democracy,” “human rights,” “representative rule,” “pluralism,” “freedom,” “participation,” “social justice,” and the like mean different things, convey different connotations, or enjoy differential legitimacy in different societies. The lists of human and social rights contained in the constitutions, or injunctions to democracy and representative rule, constitute aspirations and future goals for the society to achieve.
