NewsLatin AmericaKarina Batthyany: “Half of the Latin American population is still marginalized from social protection”

Karina Batthyany: “Half of the Latin American population is still marginalized from social protection”

Her name is Karina Batthyany Dighiero and she is the executive director of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), an international non-governmental institution created in 1967 that has associative status with UNESCO. Batthyany is the first Uruguayan to hold this position (the second woman since 1967) and is now in her second term, which will expire in 2025. We meet her on her trip to Europe, specifically, at the headquarters of the Institute of International Studies and Europeans Francisco de Vitoria, at the Carlos III University of Madrid. The purpose of her visit is to foster new collaborative ties between the organization that she represents and innovative realities. For example, with the Chair of Sustainability, Social Inclusion, Diversity and Human Rights of the same institute.

CLACSO brings together 836 research and postgraduate centers in the field of social sciences and humanities distributed in 55 countries in Latin America and other continents. However, for Batthyany it is crucial to continue establishing collaborative ties in order to spread the dialogue about the great challenges of our time: “This trip is extremely positive, since it allows us to strengthen and formalize the bond of cooperation with academic institutions and social movements. with whom we maintain a common work”.

For the director, this institution is a living network with great capillarity that was created to overcome the isolation between social scientists who worked on similar issues from distant geographies. “It is that same spirit that continues to guide the Council: networking, between different disciplines, with a transnational perspective, and that strengthens efforts between people and institutions committed to social justice, equality, democracy and human rights” . This organization is a benchmark in Latin America, so Batthyany refers to the critical analysis of phenomena that cross the societies of the subcontinent.

From left to right, Jenny Torres, Rita Segato, Rosa Campoalegre and Karina Batthyany. Photography prior to the Magistral Dialogue Negritudes, Afro-Latinities, Racism and Resistance, by CLACSO2022.Diego Battistessa

Regarding the latest report on UNDP Human Development, launched last September 8 in New York, the sociologist expresses her concern about the significant setbacks in human development indicators that “several countries in the region have suffered, compared to 2019 (situation pre-pandemic). In addition, she explains how Latin America turned out to be one of the regions most affected by the pandemic. “We have something like 9% of the world’s population and during the pandemic we had 33% of deaths from covid-19 globally.”

Batthyany underlines some key concepts of the UNDP report such as insecurity, a growing polarization and, above all, the disparity that continues to plague the Latin American region: “Today we are facing an inequality that is unprecedented in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, scandalous and abysmal. We speak of inequalities, in the plural, because the gaps are multiple and long-standing: colonialism, racism, gender inequality, to name a few. Gaps that intersect with each other and enhance. For this reason, today the main challenge for the social sciences is to talk about inequality without getting used to it. To fight against the naturalization of inequities”, he claims.

Another important element has to do with the social protection of the Latin American population, an area of ​​criticism on which the Argentine leader is forceful: “There is an increase in poverty for the sixth consecutive year and inequality also continues to increase, breaking that tendency to the decline that had begun in the environment of 2002 until 2014 in an uninterrupted manner.” In this regard, the great challenge of the near future for the countries of Latin America will require discussing new bases for the social pact, placing the institutions responsible for social welfare at the center. “In Latin America, we have not yet managed to build effectively universal, sustainable and comprehensive social protection systems: if we look at it from the point of view of the labor market, half of the Latin American population still remains marginalized from social protection. This is an intolerable reality for today.”

Overcoming these obstacles —which rest, among other things, on a historical debt towards groups in vulnerable situations— requires joint and articulated work that is capable of uniting the efforts of academies, governments, activists and social movements. In this sense, the leader highlights the work of the 9th. Latin American and Caribbean Conference on Social Sciences, organized by CLACSO and hosted by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) during the first days of June this year. The event titled Plots of inequalities in Latin America and the Caribbean – Knowledge, struggles and transformations It had more than 15,000 registered and a figure of more than 100,000 visits online. “The event was a milestone for all the critical humanities and social sciences in the region: they were intense days of reunion after the pandemic: days of reflection, exchange, dialogue and common construction.”

Batthyany, who has a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Versailles Saint Quentin in Yvelines (France) and who has been a professor at the University of the Republic of Uruguay since 1992, has positioned herself as a woman who is a symbol of positive and purposeful leadership, representing an example for young Latin American women who aim to be generators of social change.

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