The Social Origins of Human Rights Popular Responses to Political Violence in a Colombian Oil Refinery Town 1919--1993

This dissertation examines why, how and with what impact people living in conflict areas organize collectively to assert human rights. The focus is the emergence in the 1980s of a human rights movement in the oil enclave of Barrancabermeja. The Barrancabermeja-based Regional Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CREDHOS) was created in 1987 in the context of dirty war fought on multiple fronts between state security forces and their paramilitary allies, on the one hand, and Marxist insurgent groups, on the other. In exploring the history of a human rights movement in one of Colombia's most chronically war-affected regions, this dissertation expands our understanding of how frontline activists interpret human rights principles from the bottom-up. Human rights movements cannot be viewed as axiomatic or simple humanitarian responses to political violence. The term "human rights" refers to contingent norms and practices that are derived from lived experiences of authoritarianism, war, poverty and social exclusion. In this dissertation I argue that social activists in the war-torn Colombian oil town of Barrancabermeja undertook human rights activism both as a strategy of self-preservation and as a transformative praxis. In Barrancabermeja, the struggle for human rights did not displace or supplant longstanding local struggles for social justice and political change. Rather, human rights was considered to be a form of social protest consistent with previously existing traditions of popular radicalism for which Barrancabermeja has become celebrated.