Jessica Stites Mor (ed.), Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), pp. x + 305, $29.95 pb, $21.95 e-book.

Human rights was perhaps the defining feature of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Although much attention was given at the time to its impact on US relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Latin America was equally, if not more, important in defining and implementing Carter’s vision of a human rights foreign policy. Latin America was the site of some of the Carter administration’s most visible and concentrated human rights diplomacy, and revealed the central logic and persistent challenges of implementing a coherent, comprehensive human rights policy that worked in tandem with other US interests. Carter’s Latin America policy reimagined US national interests and paired human rights with greater respect for national sovereignty, challenging US patterns of intervention and alignment with right-wing anticommunist dictatorships throughout the Cold War. In the Southern Cone, the Carter administration’s efforts to distance the United States from repressive Cold War allies and foster improvements in human rights conditions provoked nationalist backlash from the military regimes, and faced domestic criticism about the economic and security costs of new human rights policies. Similarly, in Central America, the administration faced the challenge of reforming relations with abusive anticommunist allies in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador without supporting communist revolution. Its tepid and cautious response to violence by the Central American governments called into question the Carter administration’s commitment to its human rights agenda. In Cuba, the Carter administration sought to advance human rights as part of a larger effort to normalize relations between the two countries, an effort that was ultimately stymied by both geopolitical dynamics and domestic politics. Although limited in the fundamental changes it could coax from foreign governments and societies, the administration’s policy had a tangible impact in specific high-profile human rights cases. In the long term, it helped legitimize human rights as part of international diplomacy in Latin America and beyond, amplifying the work of other government and nongovernment proponents of human rights.

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Principles in Power

10.7591/cornell/9781501713682.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Vanessa Walker

Keyword(s):

Human Rights ◽

Latin America ◽

Cold War ◽

The United States ◽

Direct Result ◽

New Paradigm ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Human Rights Advocacy ◽

International Power ◽

The Cold War

This book explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the U.S. government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. The book shows that the new human rights policies of the 1970s were based on a complex dynamic of domestic and foreign considerations that was rife with tensions between the seats of power in the United States and Latin America, and the growing activist movement that sought to reform them. By addressing the development of U.S. diplomacy and politics alongside that of activist networks, especially in Chile and Argentina, the book shows that Latin America was central to the policy assumptions that shaped the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda. The coup that ousted the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, sparked new human rights advocacy as a direct result of U.S. policies that supported authoritarian regimes in the name of Cold War security interests. From 1973 onward, the attention of Washington and capitals around the globe turned to Latin America as the testing ground for the viability of a new paradigm for U.S. power. This approach, oriented around human rights, required collaboration among activists and state officials in diverse places. The book tells the complicated story of the potentials and limits of partnership between government and nongovernment actors. Analyzing how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, it explores the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy.

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The Chilean Catalyst

Principles in Power ◽

10.7591/cornell/9781501713682.003.0002 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 15-61

Author(s):

Vanessa Walker

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Human Rights ◽

Foreign Policy ◽

Latin America ◽

Cold War ◽

National Interest ◽

The United States ◽

South American ◽

Human Rights Abuses ◽

Policy Mechanisms

This chapter traces the rise of the Movement — an influential coalition of left-liberal human rights actors targeting U.S. policy in Latin America — in response to the 1973 Chilean coup. It reveals the centrality of Latin America in 1970s human rights activism and formulation of human rights foreign policy mechanisms, including foreign aid legislation and bureaucratic structures in the State Department. Unlike human rights violations in the Soviet sphere, U.S. advocates viewed human rights abuses in Chile as a product of U.S. political dysfunction resulting from Cold War paradigms of national interest and excessive concentration of power in the presidency. Coming in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the failures of Vietnam, U.S. complicity in the Chilean coup and the subsequent repression underscored the antidemocratic nature of Cold War foreign policy, highlighting the connections between foreign human rights abuses and U.S. policies. Using the information generated by South American advocates, newly organized and vocal human rights groups in the United States and their congressional partners advanced a slate of legislative initiatives targeted at the nexus of foreign repression and U.S. policy, challenging the logic and substance of Cold War alliances.

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