As gold prices have soared, the Amazon and its inhabitants have had to bear the brunt of a rampant, environmentally destructive gold-mining rush. Small and medium-sized illegal, informal, and other irregular forms of so-called artisanal gold mining, as well as large-scale corporate gold mines, cause major and multifaceted socioenvironmental–health–human rights crises. The dynamics of the gold-mining boom are important to understand the key political economic sectors behind forest degradation and deforestation and to highlight how RDPEs work. The overall situation in the Amazon is presented, analyzing the causes of gold mining and the violence, especially in Peru, Brazil, and other key regions. The triple frontier between Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil is also analyzed as the irregular gold-mining RDPE is one of the most important drivers of deforestation. In this region, gold-mining operations are led by ex-guerilla groups in Venezuela, paramilitaries and other armed groups in Colombia, and, increasingly, by the First Capital Command and other drug factions from southeastern Brazil in Roraima’s Yanomami Indigenous lands.

The legal recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ collective land rights is contentious in Colombia. There are enduring land disputes between state actors and Indigenous communities. Land rights policies have passed through several political cycles, but these have typically been poorly implemented, routinely violated by state actions, and often rolled back with new legislation. The 1991 National Political Constitution (NPC) transformed Indigenous-state relations, where for the first time in Colombia’s history, the collective cultural and land rights of Indigenous Peoples were recognized and protected in the country’s supreme law. To date, Indigenous Peoples have secured exclusive ownership rights to over 33 million hectares of collective lands, or 28 percent of the country. However, most Indigenous lands were titled before the 1991 NPC, which was constrained in its promise by a long-lasting internal armed conflict (among other factors). A 2016 historic Peace Agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas promised to address the root cause of the conflict: land ownership disputes. This agreement has yet to resolve the land problem. Taking a historical perspective, this chapter analyzes the structural political and legal barriers to Indigenous land rights in Colombia. The chapter examines the interaction of the Peace Agreement with land rights laws and explores the strategies of Indigenous Peoples to secure and safeguard their land rights in this new context. The chapter concludes with recommendations for strengthening land rights across the nation.

The introduction outlines the geographies of slavery and black freedom in eighteenth-century Colombia, the significance of region and race in Colombian history, and the importance of the mobilities of black people, their labour, and their culture in traversing and connecting New Granada’s Caribbean and Pacific worlds. Fisk argues for the centrality of geography, in particular place and mobilities, for shaping black religious knowledge and practice in a period (1690–1790) rarely studied by historians of African diasporic cultural history. After a historiographical and theoretical examination of how African diasporic religious formation has been studied, Fisk explores the variety of regimes of slavery and sites in which people of African descent resided in colonial Colombia – from cities, haciendas, and mines to maroon communities. She argues that place fundamentally shaped how people of African descent engaged with Catholicism. She conceptualises black Catholic practice in eighteenth-century New Granada as an “interstitial religion,” born of the physical and metaphorical interstices in a colonial society governed through slavery and introduces a methodology of religious geographies for the study of black religious knowledge where there is no written canon.

Chapter 6 examines how parties and the military shaped democracy in Argentina and Colombia. Both countries were ruled by authoritarian regimes in the nineteenth century that manipulated elections to remain in power. A strong opposition party, the Radical Civic Union, arose in Argentina in the 1890s and this party initially sought power through armed revolts as well as elections, but the professionalization of the military at the end of the nineteenth century made armed struggle futile. The Radicals pushed for democratic reforms but could not achieve them until a split within the ruling party led dissidents to come to power. After passage of the reforms in 1912, the Radicals won the presidency, but Argentina then lacked a strong opposition party, which undermined democracy in the long run. In Colombia, two strong parties arose during the nineteenth century and whichever party was in the opposition sought power at times via armed revolt. Colombia professionalized its armed forces in the early twentieth century, however, which forced the opposition to abandon the armed struggle. The opposition began to focus on the electoral path to power, but was only able to enact democratic reforms thanks to a split within the ruling party. In the wake of these reforms, Colombian elections became relatively free and fair, but the country's military was not strong enough to contain increasing regional violence, which undermined the country's democracy.

Despite geopolitical pressures toward harmonization, Latin American countries enjoy a long history of legal innovation. Yet these local legal differences – when considered at all – mostly figure as diagnoses of legal underdevelopment. In addition to making heterodox laws and legal institutions better known in the legal literature, the structural bias against their recognition must be frontally addressed. This chapter contributes to that work by challenging one of the main elements of this hierarchical arrangement: specifically, legal informality as a marker of underdevelopment. The chapter first examines the notion of legal heterodoxy itself and introduces the theory of heterodox legal informality as Latin America’s pre-eminent contribution to modern law. In a number of legal domains in Latin America, the locus of informality is – or has been –simply different from where global hegemonic models prescribe. It then examines two instances of heterodoxy in private law in Latin America: (i) its previous model of selective secured lending, which has been largely replaced by the liberalizing approach to secured transactions modeled after the US Uniform Commercial Code; and (ii) the innovative property law regime within the context of private law transitional justice in Colombia.

In South America, investment chapters have been used by some governments, notably in Chile, Colombia and Peru, to replace outdated bilateral investment treaties and extend countries’ investment protection commitments. In other countries, such as Brazil, investment chapters are a means to rethink the governance of foreign investment altogether. This chapter traces the evolution of South America’s PTA investment chapters from 2001 to 2022, focusing on the types of reforms adopted and the domestic factors that shape the reforms governments are willing to accept. It finds that PTA investment chapters exhibit an increasing diversity of reforms over time, although the vast majority of agreements are designed to maintain traditional investment protection standards. This variation is partly driven by the legitimacy crisis of international investment law. Arguably, this crisis has created more political space for South American preferences in investment treaty lawmaking. However, who dominates reform debates is just as important for countries’ reform preferences as their experience with investor-state arbitration. Regardless of reform preferences, the main outcome of PTA investment chapters has been further fragmentation in an already complex and incomplete area of international economic law. This fragmentation, if allowed to continue, may exacerbate the very challenges that governments are seeking to address through their reform efforts in order to promote sustainable and inclusive development.

This and the following chapter look at how infusing corruption into areas of human-rights related practice could make a difference. Here I consider transitions from dictatorship or internal armed conflict, and in particular how transitional justice has dealt with corruption. I focus on 3 emblematic transitions from different recent time periods: South Africa, Tunisia and Colombia, and add in some lessons from prior discussion of Guatemala. I find that failure to vet and control military intelligence officers, economic privatization and decentralization, and lack of attention to judicial selection and to auditing, tax and other controls contribute to the emergence of powerful alliances of corrupt officials, organized crime and predatory elites.

This chapter considers access to courts for victims of grand corruption, especially in Latin America. It explains the origins and meaning of victim compensation in the UNCAC, how “victim” is defined in human rights law, and uses the Honduran Gualcarque River case to introduce how courts are beginning to apply concepts from human rights law to cases involving victims of grand corruption. It divides these cases into “direct harm” suffered by individual or group victims, and cases involving broad or diffuse harm where victims as a class are represented by civil society organizations. It looks briefly at which civil society organizations should be able to represent victims in proceedings.