EDITORIAL Business and Human Rights in Latin America: An Introduction to the Special Issue Humberto Cantú Rivera 1 * , Danielle Anne Pamplona 2 and Ulf Thoene 3 1 Professor at the School of Law and Social Sciences and Director of the Human Rights and Business Institute of the University of Monterrey, Mexico 2 Professor and Director of the Human Rights Clinic at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Paraná, Brazil 3 Associate Professor, Universidad de La Sabana, Colombia *Corresponding author. Email: humberto.cantu.r@gmail.com I. Introduction In his landmark 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez wrote about the ‘Banana Massacre’, where plantation workers that had been striking against the United Fruit Company to improve their working conditions were killed by the military. Despite being an event depicted in a magic realism novel, this example also shows some of the characteristics of Latin America, where colonialism, the close relationship between business and governments, and the incessant fight to protect people from human rights abuses, often converge not just in literature, but in real life. Indeed, Latin America is marked by contradictions between very progressive domestic human rights frameworks and increasing levels of social inequality and poverty; by being part of global value chains while also having an important percentage of informal economy; and by promoting the development of rules and practices without a sufficiently strong rule of law and fragile democracies. To some extent, as the land of magic realism, the business and human rights field in many cases is a real-life example of the nuances and complexities of the region, where progress and challenges are frequently intertwined. Yet, for all the difficulties and shortcomings that the region faces, it has made important contributions to the field of business and human rights, not just at the regional level, but globally. This introduction to the special issue serves to point to some of them, while also exploring the role of Latin America as a test field for global standards, as a source of business and human rights standards, and as a place that provides important experiences in relation to access to remedy. II. Latin America and its Contributions to the Business and Human Rights Field Despite the inherent contradictions existing in Latin American societies in relation to human rights, the region has made important contributions to the development of the business and human rights field, even before the field was termed as such (or even existed). Beginning with the negotiations of a New International Economic Order 1 in the 1970s, © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press. 1 General Assembly, Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, A/RES/S-6/3201 (1 May 1974). Business and Human Rights Journal (2022), 7, 335–341 doi:10.1017/bhj.2022.28 https://doi.org/10.1017/bhj.2022.28 Published online by Cambridge University Press