CHILD MORTALITY REDUCTION IN SOUTHERN CONE COUNTRIES: SIGN OF DEVELOPMENT, WITH OR WITHOUT REALIZATION OF RIGHTS?

According to the latest reports submitted to the international community, Southern Cone countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay) have shown a noticeable decrease in the level of mortality in children under the age of 5, which grants them conditions to fulfill the goals to reduce child mortality set at their adhesion to the Millennium Summit (2000). Notwithstanding these predictions, said reports, in general, do not address in detail the problems of differences inside the countries and of preventable deaths, two issues which are essential to study to what extent the advances linked to development have enabled the joint realization of human rights. In order to give an answer to this, we refer to the information produced by the national vital statistics offices, and we apply several measures to this information which allow for estimation of differences between social, geographical and cultural sectors (and the temporal dynamics they describe). Likewise, we try to identify preventable deaths and their composition in order to determine the role of the population; so as to give continuity to the decreasing trend in the level of deaths occurring during the early years of life.