Rights-Based Frames and the Politics of Urban Security: Lessons from Bogotá

• In Event: Governance and Social Services Delivery in Developing Countries

Abstract

Why do states harness human rights frames to advance urban security interventions? In May 2016, the government of Bogotá, Colombia led a large-scale security operation of a small zone called “The Bronx” in the center of Bogotá, which had been the epicenter of criminal networks, homelessness, and illicit activity in the city. This intervention was led by security forces, yet was framed by state actors as an effort to advance the human rights of marginalized children and homeless citizens who had been trapped into sexual slavery and drug addiction by powerful criminal organizations. The government’s use of a rights discourse to frame a security intervention is surprising. The 2016 Bronx intervention followed a similar operational model as other security interventions in the center of Bogotá—none of which were justified as human rights interventions. Moreover, center-right mayor Enrique Peñalosa’s embrace of human rights discourses goes against recent trends among other right-wing governments in Latin America, which have embraced hardline, mano dura discourses that call for increasing militarization and the suspension of civil liberties to combat violent crime. In addition, the adoption of a human rights framing is particularly puzzling given the highly stigmatized nature of the groups targeted in the Bronx intervention.

This paper analyzes the emergence of a strategic frame of human rights in the Bronx of Bogotá, with the aim of shining a light on broader questions of how and why rights discourses are harnessed in the field of urban security policy. It makes two contributions. First, it develops a typology of different frames used to justify urban security interventions, comparing rights frames with the more common frames of fighting crime and revitalizing public space. Second, it explains that rights-based frames are adopted under two conditions: 1) ideas behind human rights become politically powerful through legal and discursive shifts; and 2) governments face political liabilities that preclude alternative framings. I develop this argument through an over-time comparison of security interventions in Bogotá, drawing on 40 semi-structured interviews, an extensive news archive of over 700 articles, freedom-of-information requests, and other policy archives. I contend that a human rights frame was adopted in 2016 due to policy legacies built up by the prior four mayors in Bogotá, which shifted public understandings of Bogotá’s city center as a place populated by citizens, rather than a site of battles between criminal organizations and the state. This paper advances the importance of theories of ideas and discourse into our study of urban governance and security in developing countries.

Author

• Lindsay Rose Mayka, Colby College