Pensamento descolonial e teoria crítica dos direitos humanos na América Latina: um diálogo da partir da obra de Joaquín Herrera Flores

Abstract

The objective of the present study is to analyze in which ways can the Joaquín Herrera Flores’s critical theory of human rights be related with the decolonial thinking, in a way to search for epistemological and methodological elements that reflects the specificities of Latin American reality in a substantiation of human rights. The investigation intends to face the ambiguities and paradoxes related the discourses of human rights, systematizing them in two different aspects. The first is located in the regulatory dimension of human rights, that is based on the European universalism and on the idealistic conceptions that define human rights as aprioristic and inherent values that belong to all human beings. The second one is expressed by a socio-historical and contextual vision of these rights, which identify then as struggle process that are able to congregate different experiences of political empowering, in a way to destroy oppressive and restrictive visions of the human. By using the reference of decolonial thinking and Herrera Flores’s critical theory of human rights, the first conception of human rights, that is based on liberalism and on the notion of modern subject, can be criticized as a notion that gave space and legitima cy to the expansion of capital in the peripheral countries. At the same time, with descolonial thinking, it can be said that this vision impeded the affirmation and the live of diferent forms of socializing that do not reproduce the hegemonic logic. A bibliographic and documental analysis allowed a dialogue between decolonial thinking and the Herrera Flores’s proposal of reinventing human rights, in order to search for a non imperialistic substantiation of human rights that can better read the struggles for human dignity in XXI century. Despite the functionality of human rights discourse in the reproduction of the colonilaity of power in the peripheral countries, this search intends to analyze how critical and decolonial theory can reinvent the discourse of human rights according to a praxis that is centered in a critical conception of rights, able to offer some responses to the anticapitalists and anticolonials struggles.