The Chilean Catalyst

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.

scholarly journals U.S. Race Relations and Foreign Policy

2021 ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
Susan Page
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
United Nations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
The United Nations

It is easy for Americans to think that the world’s most egregious human rights abuses happen in other countries. In reality, our history is plagued by injustices, and our present reality is still stained by racism and inequality. While the Michigan Journal of International Law usually publishes only pieces with a global focus, we felt it prudent in these critically important times not to shy away from the problems facing our own country. We must understand our own history before we can strive to form a better union, whether the union be the United States or the United Nations. Ambassador Susan Page is an American diplomat who has faced human rights crises both at home and abroad. We found her following call to action inspiring. We hope you do too.

scholarly journals Hunting Indians: Globally Circulating Ideas and Frontier Practices in the Colombian Llanos

2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carwil Bjork-James
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Agricultural Cooperative ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Geographies

AbstractIn the mid-twentieth century, renewed colonization of the Llanos region of Colombia brought escalated violence to the closely related Guahibo and Cuiva peoples. This violence was made public by two dramatic episodes that became international scandals: a December 1967 massacre of sixteen Cuivas at La Rubiera Ranch, and a 1970 military crackdown on an uprising by members of a Guahibo agricultural cooperative in Planas. The scandals exposed both particular human rights abuses and the regional tradition of literally hunting indigenous people, and provoked widespread outrage. While contemporaries treated these events as aberrations, they can best be explained as the consequence of policies that organize and manage frontiers. Both events took place in a region undergoing rapid settlement by migrants, affected by cattle and oil interests, missionaries, the Colombian military, and U.S. counterinsurgency trainers. This paper draws on archival research to trace the events involved and explains their relation to globally circulating policies, practices, and ideas of frontier making. It illustrates how Colombians eager to expand their frontier in the Llanos emulated and adapted ideas of human inequality, moral geographies that make violence acceptable in frontier areas, economic policies that dispossess native peoples, and strategies of counterinsurgency warfare from distant sources. Ironically, their quest for modernity through frontier expansion licensed new deployments of “archaic” violence. The Llanos frontier was thus enmeshed in an interchange of frontier-making techniques that crisscrosses the world, but particularly unites Latin America and the United States.

Beyond Orthodoxy: Asserting Latin America's New Strategic Options Toward the United States

2011 ◽  
Vol 53 (04) ◽  
pp. 127-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Russell ◽  
Juan Gabriel Tokatlian
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Policy Models ◽  
Strategic Options ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This essay explores the possibility that Latin America may deploy new strategic options in its relations with Washington at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It starts by evaluating what have been the five major foreign policy models of the region with regard to Washington since the end of the Cold War. It proceeds by evaluating the recent dynamics of Latin American insertion into world affairs. Then it introduces three new alternatives for handling U.S. Latin American relations in the coming years. It concludes by pointing out the importance of understanding the scope of the hemispheric challenges for both the region and Washington.

scholarly journals The Myth of 9/11 in Latin America

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-40
Author(s):  
Ana Isabel Lopez Garcia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Illegal Migration ◽  
The U.S

It is often argued that the first and most visible impact of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 has been the reordering of Washington’s priorities in its relations with Latin America. The United States (U.S.) has focused its attention outside the hemisphere and placed Latin America at the “bottom of U.S. terrorist agenda” (Youngers 2003). Various scholars argue that the U.S has returned to its Cold-War stance, in which it only notices those developments in Latin America that directly challenge U.S. interests (Hakim 2006). Accordingly, after 9/11 U.S. security demands have overshadowed other issues that Latin American countries consider priorities (Youngers 2003, 2). Susan Kauffman (2002), for instance, posits that: “once again the United States is looking at Latin America through a security lens, while Latin America wants the emphasis to remain on economic development.” The effects of U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America after 9/11 have not repeated the pattern of the Cold War. Although Latin America no longer is the overriding priority of American foreign policy, the U.S. has not neglected the region, nor, as many analysts have argued (Shifter 2004; Youngers 2003; Hakim 2006; Roett 2006), has it become disengaged from the hemisphere. The terrorist attacks did not introduce a different agenda for U.S.-Latin American relations from that of the post-Cold-War period. Free trade, illegal migration and the fight against drugs have continued to be the main issues of U.S.-Latin American relations. Even the trend towards militarization of U.S. foreign policy began in Latin America long before the terrorist attacks. U.S.-Latin America relations have been affected significantly not by the consequences of 9/11, but rather by the negative effects of the U.S-promoted economic model in the region. The failures of the so-called Washington Consensus are not linked to the terrorist attacks.

The Politics of Complicity

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Vanessa Walker
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Critical Elements ◽  
International Policies ◽  
Human Rights Advocacy ◽  
International Power

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, which reveals the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy. U.S. Cold War policies were deeply implicated in the human rights violations perpetrated by many of Latin America's governments. This entanglement of U.S. policy and human rights abuses make the Western Hemisphere a critical site for the development and implementation of U.S. human rights diplomacy during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan presidencies. New human rights advocacy targeting Latin America in the 1970s not only sought to mitigate foreign abuses but also challenge Cold War relationships between the United States and repressive right-wing regimes, contesting presidential prerogatives over the very mechanisms of U.S. foreign policy making. Latin America is essential for revealing the uniquely anti-interventionist and self-critical elements of human rights policy that took shape at this time; it was at the core — not the periphery — of both U.S. domestic policy debates and the new international policies that reached far beyond the hemisphere.

Chile-US Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick William Kelly
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Neoliberal Restructuring ◽  
The Cold War

The relationship between Chile and the United States pivoted on the intertwined questions of how much political and economic influence Americans would exert over Chile and the degree to which Chileans could chart their own path. Given Chile’s tradition of constitutional government and relative economic development, it established itself as a regional power player in Latin America. Unencumbered by direct US military interventions that marked the history of the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico, Chile was a leader in movements to promote Pan-Americanism, inter-American solidarity, and anti-imperialism. But the advent of the Cold War in the 1940s, and especially after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, brought an increase in bilateral tensions. The United States turned Chile into a “model democracy” for the Alliance for Progress, but frustration over its failures to enact meaningful social and economic reform polarized Chilean society, resulting in the election of Marxist Salvador Allende in 1970. The most contentious period in US-Chilean relations was during the Nixon administration when it worked, alongside anti-Allende Chileans, to destabilize Allende’s government, which the Chilean military overthrew on September 11, 1973. The Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990), while anti-Communist, clashed with the United States over Pinochet’s radicalization of the Cold War and the issue of Chilean human rights abuses. The Reagan administration—which came to power on a platform that reversed the Carter administration’s critique of Chile—reversed course and began to support the return of democracy to Chile, which took place in 1990. Since then, Pinochet’s legacy of neoliberal restructuring of the Chilean economy looms large, overshadowed perhaps only by his unexpected role in fomenting a global culture of human rights that has ended the era of impunity for Latin American dictators.

Latin American Nationalism and the United States

1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-13
Author(s):  
Alfred B. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Latin American ◽  
National Interest ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
American Nationalism

In Latin America three main currents of nationalism exist. One of these, middle class, fits well the excellent definition suggested by Professor Paul Shoup, displaying a fundamental attachment to the values in a country's national culture and history; a need for a considerable degree of independence with priority given to one's own immediate national interest; and, finally, nationalistic emphasis upon industrialization as a means of progress. The second and third currents of nationalism are fraudulent in character, that is, nationalistic feelings are manipulated by Communists to serve the purposes of Russian or Chinese Communist foreign policy, and a similar manipulation by members of the privileged elite to protect their monopoly of political and economic power sometimes may be found.

scholarly journals The Politics of Brazilian Foreign Policy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrés Malamud ◽  
Júlio C. Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
South American ◽  
University Departments ◽  
General Field ◽  
Foreign Ministry

From November 1902 through February 1912, four presidents governed Brazil. Throughout all this period, though, only one person headed the foreign ministry: José Maria da Silva Paranhos Jr., alias Baron of Rio Branco (20 April 1845–10 February 1912). This political wonder and diplomatic giant was to shape Brazil’s international doctrine and diplomatic traditions for the following century. His major achievement was to peacefully solve all of Brazil’s border disputes with its South American neighbors. Founded in 1945, Brazil’s prestigious diplomatic school carries his name, Instituto Rio Branco, and, since the early 2000s, Brazilian foreign policy has become the largest subfield of international relations in university departments across the country. Indeed, Brazilian foreign policy is to Brazilian academia what American politics is to US academia, namely, a singular phenomenon that has taken over a general field. In contrast with the United States, most in-depth research from about 1998 to 2010 came from foreign-based scholars; however, since then a large cadre of mostly young academics in Brazil have seized the agenda. Unlike the pre-2000 period, the orientation has been toward public policy rather than diplomatic history. That the top Brazilian journals of international relations are now published in English rather than Portuguese attests to the increasing internationalization of the field.

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