Corporate Hit Men

To test the theoretical components of the argument presented in chapter 5, this chapter develops an empirical model of how U.S. transnational corporations and paramilitary death squads mediate the U.S.-sponsored drug war’s effect on human rights repression in Latin America. In outlining this empirical model, this chapter is organized as follows: It first juxtapose the theoretical arguments of dependency and neoclassical liberal theories regarding the human rights effects of transnational capital by highlighting the theoretical and empirical limitations of neoclassical liberal claims. This is followed by a discussion of the empirical model, which draws on the extant human rights literature to identify important control variables that are important predictors of state repression. It then discusses important theoretical modifications that are incorporated into the overall empirical model. This is followed by a discussion of the limitations of the indicators used to measure the model’s mediating variables. structural equation modeling is used to analyze cross-national data for thirty-one countries from the Latin American region covering the period 1980 to 2012. All the components of the theoretical argument found strong statistical support.