Deliberative Democracy in Action

Abstract

Democracy has a fraught relationship with social injustice. Democracy is often promoted, if not imposed, as a cure for the social injustice of oppressive regimes, and yet in young democracies this ideal is often used as nothing more than a rhetorical device, and in some cases even as a convenient facade to hide the worst kind of social injustice. In the case of Guatemala for example, it was in the name of democracy that in the past 50 years 200,000 people, the vast majority of which were innocent civilians, were massacred. During the 1980s, the Guatemalan government appealed to the intransigent defence of democracy to justify counterinsurgency strategies of abominable cruelty, even though those communities that were singled out for extermination, the Comunidades de Población en Resistencia, or Communities of Population in Resistance (CPRs), lived according to one of the most advanced forms of democratic ethos and organization existing anywhere in the world.