Military assistance and discretionary militarization: a distinctive approach to the restoration of the constitutional order within the framework of the legitimate right to social protest

Abstract

This paper addresses the notion of social protest as an institution with a two-dimensional scope; as a fundamental right and as a mechanism of participation, exercised preferentially by groups living at a disadvantage vis-à-vis other social aggregates. It also explains the scope that, as means of intervention, the notions of military assistance and militarization of the territory have in the context of social protest. It explains the applicational and conceptual distances between the functions of security and defense in the Constitutional Rule of Law framework assigned to two different components of the Public Force, the police and the military, respectively. To this end, it resorts to the legal-constitutional method in which fundamental rights act as means of theoretical-conceptual scope, which nourish substantial contents to the law in force for its consequent application and its material realization, taking as a general reference the latinamerican context from a specific descriptive approach of the colombian case in the National Strike 2021. It concludes by arguing that, in social protest, collective action is not only controlling of state action, but also prescriptive of the normative order with incidence in its permanent transformation.

Summary:
I. INTRODUCTION. II. (IN)-DEFINITION OF SOCIAL PROTEST. III. STATE RESPONSE - MILITARY AND POLICE. 1. Military assistance and militarization. Conceptual approach. IV. RELEVANT DATA OF THE SOCIAL PROTEST. 1. What did the CIDH say about the human rights violations in the context of the protests? V. CONCLUSIONES.