The idea that human rights should be defended appears unobjectionable. In Latin America, the brutal experience of 1970s and ’80s military rule underscored the importance of protections against arbitrary detention, torture, and execution and convinced many on the Left that political rights that formerly might have been considered “bourgeois” — due process, freedom of speech and assembly, multiparty elections — were in fact critical, both in and of themselves and as necessary conditions for waging popular struggles to tame, transform, and transcend capitalism.

The fall of the Soviet Union and the failures of “actually existing socialism” only reinforced this view.

The record of leading human rights organizations in Latin America, however, show how hollow certain applications of the concept can be. The recent work of Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Venezuela offers an interesting case study. HRW has paid few states more attention than Venezuela: since 2014, it has issued three reports and more than sixty statements related to the country, documenting Venezuela’s worsening social (or “humanitarian,” as per HRW) crisis.